Botanical tattoo of pink and purple lilies, grey butterflies and dotted vines running down a person's back.

Lilies and butterflies down the back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A long vertical tattoo runs down the side of a bare back, showing three lilies with pink and purple petals, several grey butterflies and a vine of dots and curling tendrils. The flowers have soft shading and fine detail, while the leaves, stems and butterflies are rendered in black and grey. The design rises diagonally from the lower back to the upper back, with the colour lilies framing the grey elements.

Botanical Realism Back Lily Butterfly Vine Dot Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You carry the cuttings down Colliery Row in a biscuit tin, wrapped in wet newspaper, because your mother swore the spoil heap would swallow anything planted without a prayer. Nobody on the row has grown a flower since the shaft was sunk. The lilies you bought at Barnsley market look wrong already, thin and bruise-coloured, leaning towards the winding gear as if someone up there has promised them light.

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Your father watches from the step with his pipe unlit. He says lilies are for funerals, and you tell him that's why you want them, because the Ackroyd boy was buried last month and the pit has given the village nothing since but dust. You kneel in the yard and work the soil with a dessert spoon. Coal dust settles on your knuckles in small dark dots, the same dots that freckle the lamp room wall, and when the wind gets up, grey moths lift off the slag bank and flutter round your head as if they've come to see what you're doing.

The first bloom opens the week the seam is declared worked out. Pink, veined with yellow, so bright against the brick that the neighbours come to their gates to look. Then the purple one. Then a third, late, which you hadn't expected. By the time the butterflies settle on the stems, their wings as grey as pit-head smoke, the lane has stopped calling you the girl with the tin.

Your father comes out one evening, sits on the step and finally lights his pipe. He looks at the flowers for a long while. "Well," he says. "Somebody had to."