Black script reading 'If love could have saved you, you would have lived forever', framed by two calla lilies with soft colour and flourishes, tattooed on the upper back.

Calla lilies and script quote on upper back

Lettering · Back · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo is a script quotation, 'If love could have saved you, you would have lived forever', set across three staggered lines with thin black swirling flourishes above and below. Two calla lilies with pale petals, orange-yellow centres and faint green stems sit at either end of the text. The linework is fine and clean, with the lilies given light shading and colour against the black lettering, and the photograph is taken straight on at the upper back.

Lettering Fine line Botanical Back Lily Script Quote Flourish Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Odette Pell had been cutting stems at the back of Pell and Daughter since before the shop had its new sign, and she could tell a bruised calla from a sound one with her eyes shut. On a wet Thursday in March the order came in on a carbon pad: forty white lilies, the card to read If love could have saved you, you would have lived forever. The biro had pressed so hard it had torn the paper at the full stop.

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Priya, sixteen and sulking over a bucket of gerberas, asked who had died. Nobody yet, Odette said, which was what she said when she did not want the question again. She set the lilies in the cool room and filled the buckets from the tap that ran cold first, the way her mother had taught her, and she did not look at the card until Saturday.

The woman who collected them was small and grey-coated, and she gave her name as Maureen Hollis, then said it again, as if it might mean something. Then Odette had it. Maureen Dunn, who had sat two desks behind her at Dover Grammar in 1971, who had borrowed a fountain pen and never returned it, and who had not spoken to her since the Christmas dance. The lilies were for the table at the Class of 71 reunion, for Lorna Vance, who had died in January and who had been, Maureen said, the best of them.

Odette wrapped the bouquet in brown paper and tied the string twice. Maureen paid in exact coins and turned at the door to ask whether the shop did a reunion discount. No, Odette said. Then she took one loose bloom from the bench, cut its stem on a slant, and tucked it into the paper beside the card, where Maureen would not see it until she got home.