Two soft-shaded blue lily flowers tattooed across the top of a foot, in a botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue lilies across the top of a foot

Botanical · Other · Colour · Photo

Two lily flowers are tattooed on the top of a foot, one smaller and set to the upper left of a larger bloom. The petals and stamens are outlined in blue with soft, blended shading that gives them a translucent, watery look. The tattoo is in blue ink only, against a warm skin tone, with the toes and a dark surface visible at the edges of the frame.

Botanical Other Lily Flower Petal Stamen

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

"Pass me the pole, Tom, the lock's already filling and the lilies are coming up under the gate again," Ada said, and her brother handed it over without looking up from the tiller.

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Their father had always said the blue lilies grew only where the water ran deepest and slowest, and that a boat which carried one bloom past the sluice would never be stopped by the lock-keeper. Ada had laughed at that when she was small. Now she leaned over the gunwale of the Marigold and watched the flowers lift on the green water, their petals thin as breath, stamens pricked with dark blue like ink dropped into milk.

The lock-keeper's wife, Mrs Pringle, came down the towpath with a tin kettle and a face like wet slate. She said the water had taken her husband two winters back and she wanted the flowers cut, every one, so the cut would stop taking boats. Ada did not argue. She knelt on the cold stone and lifted the nearest bloom with both hands, the way you would lift a sleeping bird, and pressed its stem into the cup of Mrs Pringle's palm.

Mrs Pringle stood very still. Then she laughed, a sound like a gate swinging, and tucked the flower behind her ear. By morning the whole cut was lined with blue, and the gate opened on the first turn of the windlass without a creak. The Marigold went through with her paint still wet on the bow.