Full-colour tattoo of pink lilies and butterflies running down the middle of a person's back, in a botanical realism style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lilies and butterflies down the spine

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A column of pink and orange lilies with curling stems runs down the centre of the back, with orange, blue and turquoise butterflies placed among the flowers. The petals are shaded with soft gradients and highlights, and grey swirling stems add depth between the motifs. Bright colour ink dominates the design against the skin, and the composition follows the line of the spine from shoulder blades to the lower back.

Botanical Realism Back Lily Butterfly Flower Swirl Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lamp's gone low and the wind is only pretending to sleep. You want the one about the lilies that climbed the mast? Right then. Up above Carnmoor there was a garden on the cliff where the wild lilies grew orange as a fox's coat, spotted and proud, and every summer the butterflies came in off the sea to drink from them.

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A lad called Tobiah Rudd carried a clay pot of lily bulbs aboard the brig Marigold, bound for the Indies, wrapped in wet sacking and tucked under his bunk like a sick cat. In the heat below decks the bulbs woke up anyway. Green shoots pushed through the sacking and reached for the rail. Then the butterflies found the ship. Gold ones and blue ones, three days out from land, settling on the rigging as if they'd been invited. The captain wanted the pot pitched overboard. Bad luck, he said, flowers at sea.

But the ship's cook, a silent woman named Hester Vane, took the pot into her galley and fed it with the water she'd have spent on her own tea. Each night she tied a loop of red thread around the nearest stem and pulled it a little higher up the mainmast. By the time we raised the harbour at Port Esperance, those lilies had climbed the whole mast in green ropes, and the blue butterflies were still roosting in the blocks. The captain came up on deck to shout at the crew, saw the mast, and sat down under it with his supper and said nothing at all.

So if ever you're at sea and a gold wing lands on a rope beside you, don't shoo it away. It has come a long way to keep you company.