Black line drawing of a cross entwined with two lilies and curling vines on a white background, shown as a tattoo design without a body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cross with lilies and vines

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows a bold outlined Latin-style cross with two open lily flowers, one at the upper left and one at the lower right, and thin curling vines around them. The cross has a heavy black outline with a hollow centre, while the flowers and vines are drawn with fine, even linework. It is a black ink design on a plain white background with no shading or colour.

Botanical Cross Lily Flower Vine Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The keeper's wife on Gull Skerry grew lilies where nothing else would take. Every spring she carried sacks of soil out from Hallow Quay in the supply boat, and every spring her husband swore she was wasting good tide-time on flowers. She planted them in the cracks of the rock below the lamp room, where the spray reached them each night and the gulls left them alone out of spite.

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The cross came from a wrecked trawler's rudder fitting, hammered flat by a smith called Tobias Feeney who kept the forge at the quay. He made it with a hollow heart so the wind could pass through without tearing the vines loose, and she trained the lilies up its arms with strips of old sail. By the second summer the stems were heavier than the iron, and the vines curled round it as if they meant to hold it down.

The winter the lamp failed, the mainland was blind for three nights. On the fourth, Feeney's boy saw a small pale glow low in the rocks, where no light should be. It was the lilies. Their petals had gone bright enough to catch the moon, and the wind through the hollow cross made a low note that carried far over the water. He steered by that note and the white flowers, and brought the boat in past the teeth of the skerry. The keeper never relit the lamp that year, and nobody on Hallow Quay has ever asked him why.