Black and grey calla lily tattoo with soft, shaded petals and a long stem, running along the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Calla lily on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey calla lily tattoo runs up the inner forearm, with a tall curved stem and two soft-edged, shaded petals. The ink is built from diluted grey washes and fine dark outlines, giving the flower a translucent, watercolour-like finish. The arm fills the centre of the frame, with a hand holding it at the bottom left and a dark chair and wooden floor blurred in the background.

Botanical Forearm Flower Stem Petal Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The callas had to come out before the frost found them, and Ada Pell would not trust anyone else with the knife. Tom stood at the glasshouse door with the wheelbarrow tipped against his shin and watched her work along the bed, her gloves stiff with wet soil. The spathes were the colour of old milk at the rim and deeper where they curled, and in the grey November light they looked less like flowers than like something seen through a steamed pane.

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"You're looking for the wrong thing," she said without turning round. "Everyone looks at the colour. Look at how much you can see through them." He crouched beside her. The nearest petal was thin enough that the stem behind it showed as a shadow, soft at the edges where the damp had got into it. She had told him once that the first callas came to England packed in a tea crate, and that a grower on the docks kept them in a bucket on the deck so they would not go over. He had thought she was making it up. She usually was.

Halfway along the bed she stopped at a stem gone brown at the base and bent it toward her slowly, the way you might turn a sleeping child. "This one's finished. Leave it for the wrens." She cut the three above it and laid them on the sacking, then wrapped the best one in yesterday's newspaper, folding the paper round the stem so the spathe stood up clear at the top.

"That's for Mrs Lacey's table," he said. "No." She pressed the parcel into his hands. "That's for the lad who keeps coming back to stare at them. Keep it dry on your windowsill and don't put it in water. Hold it up to the glass when the sun comes round, and you'll see what I mean."