Woman seen from behind with a red and pink lily and vine spine tattoo running down her back, plus tribal and rose arm tattoos in botanical and blackwork styles.

Lily and vine spine tattoo on a back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A woman stands with her back to the camera, showing a long vertical tattoo down the centre of her spine. The design has large red and pink lilies, smaller rose-toned blooms, thin leaves and curling vines, with a dark ornamental scroll at the base and a vertical line of script between the flowers. The flowers use soft shading in red and pink, while the vines, leaves and ornament are in black and grey linework and shading, and her arms carry black and grey tribal and rose tattoos.

Botanical Blackwork Back Forearm Lily Flower Rose Vine Leaves Script Spine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Mr Halloran,

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Your order of the Turk's cap lilies arrived in good order, though the crate had been left in the rain at the depot and two bulbs had gone soft at the neck. I have set those aside in the potting shed, where Ada keeps the cuttings that refuse to die. The rest are in the long glasshouse now, planted against the south wall where the vine went up last spring.

You asked why I would not sell the old trellis with the house. It is the only thing my father ever finished. He ran wire from the gutter to the ground in 1961 and trained the honeysuckle up it, then fell out with the honeysuckle, then with my mother, and the whole thing went wild. The vine curls out to the gutters now and the lilies come up through it in July, red as a sore throat and twice as loud. Between the third and fourth bloom he painted a name on a slat in black enamel, and I have never had the nerve to scrape it off, though the letters have faded to a brown that looks like old blood.

Ada says the bulbs will need two winters before they flower properly. I told her I can wait. Send me the invoice and I will pack the rest on Thursday, wrapped in the newspaper my father used to line the crates with, so that when you open them you will see the sports page first.

Yours faithfully, Margaret Dunn