Red and blue coloured pencil drawing of a lily with three butterflies and flowing swirls, a tattoo design with no body placement shown.

Lily and butterflies tattoo design sketch

Botanical · Colour · Flash

A coloured pencil drawing of a large lily at the base, with three butterflies rising above it on sweeping, flame-like lines. The outlines are red and the shading is soft blue and pale red across the petals and wings, with small red dots scattered near the centre. The design sits centre frame on a plain pale grey background.

Botanical Lily Flower Butterfly Swirl Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The signalman's daughter had planted the lily in a tin bath at the end of the platform, because the ground under Carrow Road station was all cinders and nothing else would take. Every evening when the last goods train went through, the flower opened a little further, and the red in its throat rose into the air like heat off a kettle.

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Old Mr Abney, who kept the level crossing, said the thing had a price. Whoever picked it would be carried off the platform and set down in the next county, and no train would ever stop for them again. So nobody picked it. The porters watered it with cold tea and talked to it the way they talked to dogs.

The winter the line flooded, a boy called Tobias came down from the hill with a sack and no ticket. He was hungry and had a cough, and he sat on the bench watching the lily bend in the wind. When the lamp was lit, three pale butterflies lifted from the petals and drifted up past the canopy, and the boy got up and followed them out onto the wet track.

In the morning the signalman found the bath empty and the bench bare. Some say the boy reached the next county. Others say he stayed, and that the wind over the cutting still lifts sparks off the rails in threes, and that nobody has picked the lily since.