Realistic colour tattoo of a blue lily above a yellow sunflower on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lily and sunflower on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A blue lily with shaded petals sits above a yellow sunflower with a grey-green centre on a limb. The petals use soft gradients and fine highlights, giving them a three-dimensional look. The flowers fill the frame vertically against a blurred indoor background.

Realism Botanical Upper arm Lily Sunflower Flower Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Tobias had been told the blue lily would never thrive in our garden, so I kept it in a clay pot by the infirmary door, where the south wall held the heat. Abbot Gerard said blue was a colour God had not given lilies. I said that was surely a matter for God to settle, not the abbot. He let me keep the pot.

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The sunflower came in a sack from a carter who had bought the seed off a Flemish trader and swore it would survive a Yorkshire winter. It did not need to. In one August it grew taller than the cloister roof, and every evening it turned its great face west, as if following the vespers bell down the valley. I told the novices it was reading the hours. They laughed at first, then began counting the sunsets with it.

In the last week of harvest the abbot came to the garden himself, sleeves rolled, and stood among the marrows looking from the lily to the sunflower and back. "You have them in the wrong order," he said. I told him the lily was for the morning and the sun for the rest of the day, and that a man could not be expected to keep one face all the hours through. He did not answer. Before compline he sent a boy to the cellar for two cups of the good wine.

We drank them on the step by the infirmary door, the pot between us. The lily was already folding its petals for the night. The sunflower, bent and heavy, still faced the last of the light, and neither of us said which of them had been right.