Pencil sketch of three lilies with trailing swirling vines in black and grey, a botanical tattoo design shown without any body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lily and vine tattoo design sketch

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of three lilies, with one bloom at the bottom left and others rising up the right side, linked by curling vines. The linework is soft and sketchy, with graded grey shading on the petals and stems. The design is shown in black and grey on a pale, vignetted background, with the lilies arranged diagonally across the sheet.

Botanical Lily Flower Vine Swirl Sketch

Find an artist for this

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

You have the galley to yourself before the four o'clock watch changes, and you spend it the way you always do, pencil behind your ear and the provisions book open at the flour. The columns are tins and sacks and tallies of powdered milk, but the margins have been filling for weeks with something else: stems that climb the page like rope, lilies opening where the tick marks should be. Bosun Halloran calls it wasting lead. You call it keeping the hand honest.

Keep reading

The bulbs came aboard at Rotterdam, a crate of them stowed under the bread locker with a Dutch label that Mr Oakes swore was a present for his wife in Grimsby. Nobody eats a lily bulb. For three days you looked at them in the dark, pale and wrapped in sacking, and thought about how a stem can be drawn to look as if it is leaning towards a light that isn't there yet.

On the night the swell came round the Humber mouth, the crate broke its lashings and split across the deck. Seawater came after it. You knelt in the slop with a rag and gathered bulbs into your apron, and the sheet you had been working on went soft and grey, the lead running into the veins of the petals until the flowers looked as though they were growing under glass.

Oakes got his garden in the end, though not the one he had planned. You pressed the cleanest sheet into his hand on the quay, three lilies climbing a vine, and told him the bulbs had gone over the side, which was almost true. He read nothing on the back, folded the drawing into his breast pocket, and you watched the gulls work the wharf while you walked back up the gangway to peel the potatoes.