Full-colour realism tattoo of green lilies and peacock feathers running down the side of a torso over the ribs.

Lilies and peacock feathers on the side ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Colour · Photo

Green lilies with yellow highlights climb diagonally across the side of the torso, with two peacock feathers curling up and down alongside them. The flowers and feathers are shaded with smooth gradients, and the peacock eyes show orange, teal and magenta rings. Bright greens, yellows and blues dominate against the pale skin, with a black backdrop behind the body.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step by the cloakroom, and sit where the band can't swallow my voice. Ada Brennan came up the back stairs of the Lantern Ballroom one wet October night in 1927, carrying a paper cone of green lilies from the market cart and a peacock-feather fan folded tight under her arm. She hadn't told a soul she was coming, and the doorman, old Sol Winch, said afterwards that she looked like a woman walking into a sum she'd already got wrong.

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Every feather has an eye, you know, and the eyes watch the dancers. Ada's fan had three of them along its spine, orange rims ringed in teal, with a magenta heart at the centre of each. Teddy Vail, who led the band and never once looked at the floor, swore the eyes blinked whenever his cornet climbed high. He said that was why he never played the request she sent up on a card, the waltz her brother had written out for her in a hospital hand.

She laid the lilies on the upright piano, one for every year since the war, and stood at the edge of the floor until the last foxtrot ended. Then she opened the fan, held it up beside her face, and let the three eyes look at the room. Nobody danced. Teddy lowered his horn and, for the first time in eleven years, played that waltz without being asked.

The lights went down at midnight, as they always do, and when Sol climbed the stair to lock up he found the lilies gone and the fan lying open on the boards. Its eyes were shut. Teddy says he knows what that means, though he won't tell me, and I've stopped asking.

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