Colour tattoo of pink, orange and red lilies with green leaves and a small green butterfly on the upper thigh, in a neo-trad style.

Lilies and butterfly on a thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows three lilies in pink, orange and deep red, with green leaves and a small green butterfly beside them. Petals are outlined in bold dark lines and shaded with smooth gradients, and a soft purple wash sits behind the flowers. The design fills the outer upper thigh, with the skin and a patterned fabric visible at the top left of the frame.

Neo-trad Botanical Thigh Lily Flower Butterfly Leaves Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tomas had the pollen brush clamped in his teeth when the air alarm went off in Bay Four, so I was the one who reached the lilies first. Three plants, rooted in grey loam hauled from the old soil reserves, the only flowers left on the Halden that nobody had bred for protein or fibre. No one had planted them for us. A great-great-grandmother had carried the bulbs aboard in a sealed tin, and every generation since had kept them alive out of stubbornness rather than sense.

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The leaves were curling at the edges where the humidity had dropped. I checked the nutrient line, then the lamp, then the little green butterfly the children called Pim, who clung to the stem of the red lily as if it had been painted there. Pim was a hatchery insect, kept for the pollination count, and it had taken to the lilies more than to anything else in the bay. Tomas said that was sentiment. I said the flowers smelled sweeter in the dark hours, and butterflies liked sweet things.

The fault turned out to be a cracked valve, nothing worse. I fixed it with a strip of tape while the mist came back into the air, and the orange bloom with the freckled throat opened another finger's width, as if it had only been waiting for the damp.

When the shift ended I climbed to the observation ring and logged what the bay was doing. Nobody on the ring asked why we bothered. Pim was still on the red lily when I left, wings folded, a small blur of green against the violet glow of the reserve lamps, and I thought, not for the first time, that someone would have to keep the flowers going long after the stars stopped meaning anything to us.