Colour traditional-style tattoo of a red scrolled heart with orange lilies, green leaves and a black silhouette, on a person's upper back.

Heart, lilies and leaves on upper back

Traditional · Back · Mixed · Photo

A red scrolled heart outline frames a black silhouette of a figure with long hair, with orange and pink lilies and green leaves sitting across the lower centre. The linework is bold and dark, with solid fills and soft shading on the petals, and the composition spreads the leaves and vines outward from the heart. The ink is mostly red, orange, pink and green with black, shown on bare skin across the upper back.

Traditional Back Heart Silhouette Lily Leaves Scroll Vine Flower

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the fire's only warm on one side. No, I'll not tell it the quick way. The quick way is how the Ledger Halls tell it, and they've got the lilies wrong.

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Out past the Brennan Reach, when the ring habitats were still stitching their gardens together, there was a woman called Ysolde Varn who kept the orchard deck on the ship Hesper's Lantern. Nobody asked her to keep lilies. Lilies don't feed anyone. But she had a box of bulbs from a world that had since gone quiet, and every shift she sat on the rail and sang to them, low, the way you'd sing to a child with a fever.

Then the lamp failed in the eastern wheel, three hundred sleepers were moved to the dark rooms, and the air went thin and sour. The engineers said the cycle would hold for nine days. Ysolde said it would not. She went down the spine ladder with a knife, a spool of red cable and every bulb she could carry wrapped in her coat. She bent a heart-shaped trellis from spare hull ribbing, wound the cable through it into scrolls, and set the bulbs at its foot until the leaves came up green under the lamp and the air began to taste of something other than rust.

When the relief crew found her, she was asleep against the trellis with a bloom in her lap and a figure scratched into the frame's spine, a woman with her hair loose down her back, the way her mother had worn it. The Ledger Halls keep that frame in a glass case now and call it a memorial. Every spring the lilies still come up through the grate on the orchard deck, and nobody there has ever been able to tell me why they bloom orange at the edges.