Colour tattoo of a white calla lily with green leaves and purple shading on the side of the torso.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Calla lily with green leaves on a side

Botanical · Other · Colour · Photo

A white calla lily with a yellow centre rises from a cluster of green leaves, set against purple swooshes that suggest movement behind the stems. The petals are shaded in soft greys and white, with smooth blended gradients rather than hard outlines. The design fills the centre of the frame on lightly tanned skin, with the lily head at the upper right.

Botanical Other Lily Flower Leaves Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm said the arums would never take in the north bed, that the wall shadowed them past noon and the clay sat cold all year. I dug them in regardless the week before Lent, when frost still furred the cloister flags and the bell had not yet rung for Lauds. He watched from the kitchen step with his hands in his sleeves and said nothing, which was how he disagreed with most things.

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The first bloom came in May, a single white funnel lifted above the leaves like a cupped hand. Its spathe curled so smoothly that the grey in its folds looked like breath on cold glass. Anselm came out to see it and stood there so long the bread in the oven began to smell scorched. "Well," he said at last, "the wall was wrong about that."

The next spring I found purple streaks in the soil where the old drain had run, dye from the dyers' hedge over the road, carried in on the rain. I did not know what to do with it, so I left it, and by June the wind had combed the leaves sideways into long green sweeps that looked like a current running under the flowers.

Anselm died in the autumn. I cut the last bloom for the altar and found the stem had kept its shape though the petals had yellowed at the tips. I set it in a jar on the sill of his cell, where the north light would fall on it in the mornings, and it stayed there until the frost came back.