Black and grey realistic calla lily tattoo with shaded petals and leaves running vertically down the side of a person's back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Calla lilies running down the back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows several calla lilies with smooth, curled petals and tapering leaves, arranged in a vertical cluster that follows the side of the back. The forms are built from soft grey shading and darker edge lines, with highlights left in the skin tone to suggest volume. The ink is entirely black and grey, and the image is framed tightly on the back with a white cloth visible at the edges.

Realism Botanical Back Flower Leaves Lily

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have the bulbs in your coat pocket when the frost comes down the valley, and you know you should have left them in the shed with the dahlia tubers. But Mrs Pascoe asked for the calla bed to be lifted before the first hard night, and you are the only one left who still does what she asks.

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The glasshouse is warm and smells of wet compost and paraffin. You kneel on a feed sack and work the fork under the rhizomes the way she showed you thirty summers ago, when she still walked the rows with a blackthorn stick and called every plant by its Latin name just to annoy the vicar. The leaves have gone the colour of old tin, tapering to points that cut your wrists when you pull them clear. The spathes are soft and brown at the lips now. When you tip one into your palm it gives like wet paper, and the curl of it holds the last of the light from the glass.

Her nephew wrote from Leeds to say the house will be sold in spring. He wants the garden cleared and the glasshouse glazed over, everything tidy for the agents. You read the letter twice at the kitchen table, then went out and cut every bloom still standing, because you could not bear to think of them going into a skip.

You wrap each bulb in the Western Morning News and write on the paper in carpenter's pencil: Pascoe, white, 1987. Then you lay them in the tin trunk under the potting bench, packed in sawdust, and close the lid. Somewhere in a house you will never see, someone will want a lily that has been waiting in the dark for them.