Colourful botanical tattoo of calla lilies and green leaves running down a person's back, with pink, orange, yellow and purple blooms.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Calla lilies running down the back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A vertical column of calla lilies and broad green leaves runs down the spine. The flowers are in pink, orange, yellow and purple, with soft shading that gives the petals depth. The tattoo fills the left of the frame against bare skin, with a grey-sleeved arm and hand at the right edge.

Botanical Back Lily Flower Leaves Petal

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are standing on the platform at Carrowby Junction with two cups of tea going cold in your hands, watching the eight-fifteen slide in with its windows fogged from the inside. Nobody you know is on it. That was the arrangement. Your sister Maud said you would be a fool to wait for a man who sends postcards of calla lilies instead of letters, and you told her a postcard was still a sort of letter, and she told you that was exactly the sort of thing a fool would say.

Keep reading

The doors open. A woman with a lemon-yellow umbrella steps down, then a boy with a cricket bat, then nobody. You count the carriages twice. The guard blows his whistle, and the tea in your left hand slops over your wrist, hot and sudden, and you laugh at yourself out loud, which makes an old man in a flat cap turn and nod as though you have said something sensible.

The last door sighs open at the far end. Thomas steps down with a canvas holdall and his hat in his hand, as if the wind might take it. He has the look of someone who has been rehearsing an apology the whole length of the Midlands. You do not let him start. You hand him the cold tea and tell him the shop on the corner has been selling calla lilies all summer, orange and purple and pink, the stems in buckets by the door, and that you have bought one every Friday since March and left them on the sill of the empty flat above the bakery, because you were not going to let the thing you had waited for look like a dead thing when it arrived.

He looks at the cup, then at you, and says that he will need a great deal of tea before he can explain himself. You take his bag. Behind the ticket barrier, the stationmaster is already sweeping up the petals that have blown in from somewhere along the track.