Pencil and ink sketch of three lilies with scrolling foliage on a sketchbook page, drawn as a botanical tattoo design with no body placement shown.

Lily and scroll design sketch

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows three lily blooms with visible stamens and petals, joined by curling scrolls and leaves at the top and lower left. Ink outlines sit over soft pencil shading that models the petals and leaves, giving a greyscale finish. The design is arranged diagonally across a sketchbook page, with a marker and a pencil resting at the right edge.

Botanical Lily Flower Scroll Leaves Stamen Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lilies came up through the cobbles of Saltergate the spring the river rose over the fish market. Nobody planted them. Old Mabel Quarrie swore they were the same white bells that grew on her grandmother's wall, though the wall had been pulled down before the war and the stones sold for hearthstones.

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She kept a stall of pickled eels and string, and every morning she counted the blooms before she lifted her shutters. Three one day, five the next. The scrolls of green came curling out between them like the ends of unrolled letters, and the rain ran off their petals in beads that did not soak in. A boy from the ropeworks asked if he might pick one for his mother. Mabel told him the flower would come back for the one who picked it, and it would take his mother's name with it. He laughed and went off whistling, and that night his mother's shutters stayed down.

In the thaw of the second year, a stranger in a grey coat stood under her awning and asked for the price of a single bloom. She said it cost a true account of what you had lost. He thought about it, then told her about a brother who had gone over the weir in March. Mabel nodded and wrapped a lily stem in newspaper, and when he unwrapped it at the door it had turned to dry paper, every petal lettered with the brother's name in her own careful hand.

The rain kept on. The market kept on too. Mabel still counts the blooms each morning, and she has never once let a child touch them.