Colour tattoo of two purple lilac flower heads with green leaves and a stem on the upper back below the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lilac sprig across a shoulder blade

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows two tall lilac flower clusters in shades of purple and violet, with a green stem and three green leaves branching below them. The purple areas use soft, speckled shading that gives the blooms a textured, painterly look, while the leaves have darker green edges and lighter highlights. The sprig sits diagonally on the upper back, with the left shoulder visible at the edge of the frame and no text or face shown.

Botanical Back Flower Leaves Stem Sprig

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lilac outside the Harrow Hall had been planted by a widow who wanted something to hide the coal shed, and by the spring of the great frost it had grown tall enough to lean over the back step. Mary Dunning swept the boards every Saturday after the band packed up, and every Saturday she found two sprigs of flower dropped on the floor by the door, though nobody had brought them in.

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Her brother Tom said it was the wind. The fiddler, old Gaskell, said the lilac wanted to dance, and that a tree which lost its bloom to the rain had every right to come in out of it. Mary didn't laugh. She had seen a young man pick a sprig once and press it to his chest, and the next week he had gone to the mill and not come home, and the sprig had been found back on the step, dry as paper.

So the next Saturday she left the back door open and the lamps low, and she waited with a broom across her knees. Near midnight the fiddle started by itself, slow, then quick, and the floor filled with figures in dark coats and long skirts the colour of bruised plums. They turned without touching. One of them, a woman with a face like rain on glass, held out a stem and said the tree was tired of waiting to be remembered.

Mary took the stem. She pressed it into the ledger of the hall, where the names of every dancer since the roof went on were kept, and wrote her own name beside it. By morning the sprig was white as bone and the floor was clean. Gaskell still tells it, and the bush still blooms every May, heavy and purple against the wall, and nobody sweeps the back step any more.