Black and grey realism tattoo of an ornate hand mirror surrounded by lilies and scrollwork, covering the upper arm and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hand mirror and lilies on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large tattoo of an ornate hand mirror with a detailed, decorative frame sits among lily flowers, leaves and fine scrollwork. The mirror is shaded with soft tonal gradients, while the flowers use lighter greys and faint pink tints. The design wraps around the upper arm and shoulder, with the mirror handle running diagonally down the lower part of the composition.

Realism Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Lily Flower Leaves Scrollwork Ornate frame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lilies were long finished when you found the mirror, half sunk in the leaf mould under the greenhouse wall. You knock the soil from its back with the heel of your trowel and the silver comes up dull and freckled, the handle furred with rust. Someone has scratched a name into the rim, but the letters have worn soft, and only the scrollwork around the glass still holds its shape, curling like smoke from a snuffed candle.

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Mrs Pruett, who has tended the borders at Halden House since before the war, takes one look and tells you to leave it be. The mirror belonged to Mrs Ashdown, she says, who used to carry it down the lily walk every July and hold it up to the blooms instead of her own face. "She said it showed you what the garden meant to be," Mrs Pruett says, not looking at you, "and she was never wrong about that." You wipe the glass on your sleeve anyway, and there they are: white trumpets opening in the silver, a full bed of them, though the real border is a tangle of brown stalks and frost.

You tell yourself it is the low sun. You carry the mirror to the potting shed and set it on the bench, then you go back out with a fork and a sack of bulbs, because the ground is soft enough to work and there is still time before the frost sets hard. By dusk you have forty bulbs in the bed, each one pressed firm and labelled in your own careless hand.

In April the first green spears break through the mulch, and by June the bed is white. When you go to the shed for the secateurs, the mirror is still on the bench, and you can see the lilies in it, nodding, exactly as they stand outside, and something in the reflection is already smiling at you before you have had the chance to smile back.