Black and grey realism tattoo of lilies, scrolling vines and a skull running down the back, with the upper back and shoulder visible.

Lilies, swirls and skull on a back piece

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded black and grey tattoo runs down the back from the shoulder blade towards the lower back, showing several lily flowers with fine stamens, curling vine swirls and a detailed human skull near the base. The shading is soft and smooth, with strong highlights on the petals and dark grey clouds behind the motifs. The composition follows the curve of the spine, with the head and hair cropped at the top of the frame.

Realism Botanical Back Lily Flower Skull Swirl Vine Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, love, and keep that lily off the good floor. The white ones. Nan Fairweather grew them in the bed under the churchyard wall, where the parish has put its dead for three hundred years, and she never once apologised for it. Her lilies went into every wedding in Thornbury and every wake besides. She used to say the two ceremonies were the same, only the hats changed.

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The spring Ada Penrose was to marry the miller's boy, the old woman sent her a bunch wrapped in brown paper, a small skull inked on the twine. Ada near threw it on the fire. Her mother took it off her and counted the stamens the way Nan had taught them. Shut anthers, she said, mean a bride who has not yet made up her mind. Ada laughed, but she had not made up her mind, and half the chapel knew it.

On the morning of the service the miller's boy came up the lane with his hat crushed in his hands. He had watched the sexton dig a fresh grave against the wall, and the sexton had read him the name on the pauper's board. It was his father's. The man had walked out of the mill ten years back, and nobody had thought to tell the boy he had died in the next parish, poor and alone, under a stone with no flowers.

The wedding did not go ahead that day. Ada walked him down to the wall, and they stood among the lilies while the sexton patched the earth. Nan's bunch lay on the bench between them, untied, the brown paper folded open like a letter nobody had finished reading. Lilies come up where the ground has been turned, Nan used to say, and they open in their own time, never the day you had planned.