Coloured pencil tattoo design of pink lilies, butterflies and lotus flowers with a script letter R, in a botanical style.

Lilies and butterflies with lotus flowers

Botanical · Colour · Flash

The drawing shows several lilies on tall stems with grey pencil shading, alongside butterflies in orange, blue and navy and two pink-red lotus flowers at the base. A script letter R sits beneath the lotuses with a few small sketched blossoms beside it. The colour is applied in soft coloured pencil over a pale cream background, and the composition is a vertical, tapering arrangement.

Botanical Lily Lotus Butterfly Flower Script Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down, our Ruth, and mind the coal scuttle. No, leave the kettle, it'll keep. You want the lily story or the one about the butterflies? You'll get both, because they came up together that spring the Hartley pit flooded and the men walked home with their lamps still lit in the middle of the afternoon.

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Mrs Dobbs had a window box on Gaunless Row, the only one on the street that wasn't black with dust. She grew lilies in it, orange and pink-red, taller than a child, and folk said she was daft to waste good soil on them. She'd tip her head at them and say they were for her Tom, who'd gone down the shaft on the Tuesday and never come up. Nobody argued. You didn't argue with a woman who'd lost a husband to the dark.

Then the warm weather came, and the butterflies came with it, blue ones and one big orange fellow that rested on the sill like he'd paid rent. They followed the lilies up the wall of the terrace, and by May there were lotuses floating in the rain butt, though nobody had planted a thing. The vicar said it was a sign. The colliery manager said it was damp. Mrs Dobbs just put the kettle on and said the flowers knew where the men were coming from.

Here's the turn, love. When they finally pumped the Hartley pit dry in June, they found Tom's dinner tin in the lowest gallery, the lid scratched with a letter R where he'd marked it years back so the lads wouldn't swap them. The lilies on the wall had gone over in one night, every bloom, and the butterflies were gone too, lifted off all at once like someone had called them home. Mind, I'm not saying it was magic. I'm saying the flowers knew before we did. Now pass me that cup and let me get my breath back.