Coloured pencil drawing of a tattoo design with pink and purple lilies, an orange patterned butterfly and black swirling vines, with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lilies, butterfly and swirls tattoo design

Botanical · Colour · Flash

A coloured pencil drawing of a tattoo design on paper. Three lilies in pink and purple sit among black swirling vines, with a butterfly with orange and red patterned wings at the upper left. The linework is dark and fine, the petals are shaded with soft gradients, and the composition is a vertical arrangement that trails down the page.

Botanical Lily Butterfly Flower Swirl Vine Flourish

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you lot, and mind the fire, because this is the bit about Tessaly's garden and the thing that grew out of her spite. Her husband had planted lilies along the wall the spring before he went to the salt pans at Harwick, and every morning she went out with a pail and cursed them for being so proud. Lilies, she said, are only sky-coloured tongues that have forgotten how to speak. So she pulled them up by the roots and threw them over the wall into the ditch where the nettles were.

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The ditch was not kind to them, and by midsummer there was nothing left but a smear of green. But the vines that ran along the wall had other ideas. They curled round the broken stones and wound themselves into little black spirals, tight as the knots in a fisherman's net, and they reached and reached until they found the pale stalks lying in the mud. Where they touched, the lilies lifted their heads again. Three came up together, pink at the lip and violet at the heart, and the vines carried their stems up the wall as if they were carrying a child up a stair.

By harvest a painted moth had come to sit on the topmost stone, its wings as orange as a banked coal and dotted with red like the spots on a hen's egg. Tessaly watched it from her window. Her husband came home that autumn, thin and sunburnt, and found his wall gone to flowers and his wife standing in the garden with her hands full of nothing. He did not ask her why. He only sat down on the step, and the butterfly, who had never been invited anywhere, lifted off the stone and landed on his knee.

So if you ever pass a wall with vines on it, do not pull the lilies. They come back when you are not looking, and they bring their own weather with them.