Black and grey calla lily tattoo with swirling black scrollwork on the side of a person's ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Calla lily and scrollwork on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A calla lily with a shaded grey petal sits at the top of the design, with bold black leaves and curling scrolls trailing down the side of the torso. The lily is softly shaded, while the foliage and swirls are solid black with clean edges. The design follows the curve of the ribs, with the flower near the upper body and the scrolls running toward the hip.

Botanical Blackwork Ribs Lily Flower Scroll Swirl Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Tilly Ashdown had kept the white lilies in a clay pot by her back door for thirty winters, because her mother always said a calla would not bloom for anyone who spoke ill over it. So when the new vicar's wife came up the lane asking for a bulb, Tilly wrapped it in sacking and told her to mind the curls on the stems, for they caught on everything.

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Edith Marr had a garden on the hill behind the church, and a run of black iron gates her husband had bought cheap from a burned-out mill. She planted the lily where the morning sun came over the wall and set the iron scrolls about its roots, and the two grew into one another until by midsummer nobody could say which curl was metal and which was stem.

Tilly climbed up in August to see it and found the flower leaning, its white hood turned away from the house. Edith said it had been watching the gate all week. Tilly knelt, pressed her thumb into the soil, and found it dry, then wet, then dry again. "It wants telling it can go where it likes," she said, and she lifted the latch herself.

That night the lily worked its roots loose from the iron and came down the lane in the dark, one slow scroll at a time. By morning the pot by Tilly's back door had a single white hood open on it, and nobody in the village ever again told her she could not keep a calla.