Colour traditional tattoo of a pink lily above a green comb with teal accents, bold black outlines, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lily and comb on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A pink lily with a yellow-tipped stamen sits above a green comb with black teeth, flanked by teal and pink petal shapes. The design uses bold black outlines and flat, lightly shaded fills in pink, green, teal and peach. The tattoo fills the centre of the frame on a pale forearm, with blurred green foliage and a brick wall in the background.

Traditional Botanical Forearm Lily Flower Petal Leaves

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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 down by the stove, and mind the cat. Nobody in Tallow Lane tells this one before midnight, because it is a midnight story, and the lily in it was not a lily at all until the comb made it so.

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Old Ruth Varley cut hair above a pawnbroker's on Pell Street, and she kept her combs in a tin of salt water so the horn would not split. Every one was cut from a single ox horn and boiled green in her dye pot. In the winter of the great fog a girl came up the stairs carrying a lily wrapped in wet newspaper. She had pulled it from a graveyard wall, she said, where it had no business growing, and she wanted a comb that would hold its head up through the wind.

Ruth set to work by the lamp. She cut twenty-two teeth, each a little longer than the last, and when she was done the comb looked like a row of fence palings standing guard. The girl pressed the lily into the teeth, and the petals opened as if a window had been pushed up somewhere far off. Ruth swore afterwards that the stamens rang faintly, like a spoon against a glass.

The girl paid in brass buttons and went down into the fog. Ruth never saw her again, but the next morning the pawnbroker's window held a row of combs, each with a flower caught in its teeth, and a card in a hand that was not Ruth's: keep the damp out of the horn and the lilies will keep you. So she does. Shut the shutter now, and go on home.