Black and grey realism tattoo of a lily with dark swirling shading on the upper arm and shoulder.

Black and grey lily on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large lily flower is shown in soft greyscale, with stamens picked out in black and dark, flowing shading behind the petals. The petals are rendered with smooth gradients and fine speckled marks, giving a three-dimensional look. The design wraps over the upper arm and curves up towards the shoulder, which is partly covered by a white vest top.

Realism Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Lily Flower Petal Stamen Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lily was still in the waiting room when you came on at ten, standing in a jam jar on the bench under the clock, its petals going the grey of old pewter in the lamplight. Nobody had claimed it. Nobody ever did. Every Thursday for eleven years a woman in a grey mackintosh had walked up from the Carlisle road, set one white lily on the third bench of platform two, and boarded the last up-train without a ticket. You had never once seen her buy one.

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Tonight the engine smoke came in low through the open doors, rolling along the tiles the way it did when the wind was wrong, and you watched it climb the wall and thicken behind the clock like ink dropped into water. Old Hebden swore it was the ghost of the express that went off the viaduct in 1958. You told him ghosts did not need coal. He said that was exactly the sort of thing a man who had never waited for anyone would say.

At ten to midnight the platform bell rang once, though the board showed nothing due. You walked out with your lamp. The bench was empty but for the jar, and the stamens had gone black with soot, six of them standing up like small iron nails. Beside the jar lay a ticket, punched and folded, dated the week the line closed, its destination a halt that had not existed for sixty years. The smoke drew back from you the way a crowd does for a stretcher.

You did not board anything. You carried the ticket to the lost property office, opened the ledger at a clean page, and wrote the date. Under Found you put: one lily, one fare, paid.