Black and grey lily with leaves and two butterflies tattooed on the side of a torso, above the hip.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lily and butterflies on the side of the torso

Botanical · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A large lily bloom with shaded petals and stem leaves sits on the side of the torso, with two small butterflies and a leaf above it. The linework is soft and the petals are built up with grey shading and some darker accents. The tattoo is shown on bare skin above a pink ruffled bikini bottom, with the subject's face out of frame.

Botanical Ribs Lily Flower Butterfly Leaves Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Your hands smell of pollen and bleach before the market lights come on. The lilies arrived in the back of a van from Lincolnshire, forty buckets of them, and you are the one who has to count them off the tailboard before Mrs Okafor's stall opens at six. Someone has wrapped a torn paper cone around each stem to keep the pollen off the cream linen.

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Halfway through the second bucket, two small brown butterflies lift out of the cones and settle on the shelf above the till, wings opening and closing like a page being turned. You know they hitched a ride. The only other person awake is the man sweeping the loading bay, who leans on his broom and tells you lilies always bring something in with them: a moth, a ladybird, once a wren that had to be coaxed out with a bread crust.

You stop counting. The big orange-throated bloom is already loosening, its dark spots like ink on an old envelope, and you realise you have been holding one open at the centre for a long minute, feeling how cold the morning has got. The butterflies circle the bloom twice and drift out through the gap in the roller door toward the car park, where the sky is turning the colour of dishwater.

When Mrs Okafor comes in at quarter to six with her keys and her flask, she finds the buckets in a neat line and one lily still open on the counter, its shadow stretched long across the scales. She asks whether you saw the butterflies. You say yes. She says good, then they won't need a cage, and goes to put the kettle on.