Black and grey botanical tattoo of lilies with long stems and soft shaded petals wrapping across a person's upper thigh and hip.

Lilies wrapping a thigh in grey shading

Botanical · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A tall stem rises across the thigh and hip, with several lily blooms, buds and long curling leaves drawn in dark outline. The petals and leaves are softly shaded in graduated greys, giving a translucent, almost X-ray effect against the skin. The composition follows the curve of the leg, with the flowers spreading outward from the central stem.

Botanical Realism Thigh Lily Flower Stem Bud Leaves Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Marian, The lilies came in at four this morning, a crate of Oriental ones from a grower outside Spalding, and I've been up with them since. Under the strip lights at the back of the wholesale hall they look ordinary. Out on the loading bay, where the sodium lamp hangs over the yard, they do something else. You can see straight through the petals to the veins, grey as pencil lead, and the stamens dangle like wire in an old radio.

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Dunnett, the foreman, says I'm soft. He says a lily is a lily and I should sort them by stem length and stop holding them up to the light like a jeweller. Maybe he's right. I took one home last winter, the one with the curled leaf, and pressed it in the atlas Dad left me. The book has gone the colour of weak tea now, and the lily has browned at the edges, but when I open it at the right page the shape is still there, a ghost of a stem laid over the map of the Wash.

Last Tuesday a woman came to the bay asking for forty stems for a funeral in Highbury. She didn't want them wrapped. She stood where I'm standing now and held one up against the lamp, and she said nothing for a long time. Then she asked if I could see the light through it. I said I could. She said her mother used to look at the hospital windows that way, as if she could see what was behind the glass.

I put two spare stems in her cab myself and didn't charge her for them. I never got her name. I only know the lamp was humming and the lilies were glowing like something that had swallowed the light and wanted to keep it a little longer. Come down at Christmas and I'll show you. Bring the atlas. Love, Tom.