Black and grey tattoo of a hand holding lily flowers above a lace-edged cuff, drawn in fine linework and dotwork shading on a limb.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hand holding lilies with a lace cuff

Botanical · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A hand rises from a lace-edged cuff at the base of the design and grips a bunch of lilies at the top. The linework is clean and dark, with hatching across the fingers and stippled dotwork shading on the petals and lace. The image is black and grey against a pale, softly lit background.

Botanical Dotwork Other Hand Lily Flower Lace Cuff

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Marit had been mending the same lace collar since the boat came in without her brother. The cuff lay on the kitchen table under the paraffin lamp, its scalloped edge half finished, and outside the wind leaned on the shutters the way it had all week.

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On Skerra the lilies grew only in the walled garden behind the kirk, tiger lilies the minister's wife had carried over from the mainland in a box of wet moss. By October their orange had gone brown at the edges. Marit cut the last bloom the morning the tide took the north jetty and carried it home with her bare hand closed around the stem, thorns or no thorns, because her mother had said a lily held that way would not wilt before its owner came back.

Ruairidh did not come back. Three weeks later the lace cuff came up in the net of a Lerwick boat, wrapped around a bundle of stalks and stiff with brine. Marit sat up a whole night picking the salt out with a bone needle, until the lamp guttered and the dotted pattern showed like a row of small stars.

In spring she set the mended cuff on the windowsill with the last of the lilies standing in a tin cup beside it. Each morning she raised her arm from the cuff, fingers curled around nothing, and waited for the sun to climb the wall and find the petals. When it did, she let her hand fall, and the flowers stayed where they were.