Black and grey botanical tattoo of lilies, leaves and a dotted drop chain across the chest, with shading in dotwork.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lily and foliage across the chest

Botanical · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A large floral tattoo of lily-like blooms, broad leaves and a sprig of foliage spreads across the skin below the bust. The petals and leaves are built from fine hatched linework and stippled dotwork shading, with a dotted chain and small drop motifs hanging beneath the flowers. The design is entirely in black and grey ink and is framed by white fabric and paper at the edges of the photo.

Botanical Dotwork Chest Lily Flower Leaf Foliage Dotted chain Drop Bloom

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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 closer, the lot of you, and mind the fire, because the fog comes in off the Sound before the tide turns and I want you warm when it does. You want the story of Old Ishbel's lily. Everyone on Carrach knows it, though not everyone believes it, and the ones who doubt it are generally the ones who have never climbed to the north wall in May.

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Ishbel kept a garden in the lee of the kirk, walled with grey stone that the sea had been trying to take for two hundred years. She grew one thing only, a white lily the mainland men called foolish, because it would not open in sunshine. It opened in the dark, and only when the drops hung from the gutter at the end of the wall, one after another, and someone counted them. That was the trick of it. Each drop had to be counted by hand, or the bloom stayed shut, and Ishbel counted them every night for forty years, her lips moving, her finger dotting the air.

Then came the winter the minister's boy went out on the Hesketh boat and did not come back. His mother sat in the kirk with her hands in her lap and would not weep, so Ishbel went up with her lantern and began to count the drops for her, all night, out loud. Nobody knows how many there were. In the morning the lily stood open, its petals black on the inside as if they had been inked, and the mother walked down to the harbour and saw the boat coming in under a clean sky.

That is all of it, and I will not have you telling me it was the lily's doing. Go home now, and count your steps on the way.