Black and grey botanical tattoo of three lilies with swirling vines running down the side of a ribcage.

Lily and vine tattoo on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

Three lily flowers stack vertically down the side of the ribs, with thin black swirling vines curling around them and rising towards the top of the frame. The petals are shaded in soft greys with darker tones at the centres and edges, giving them some depth. The composition follows the curve of the torso, with a hand resting at the right edge and a fitted top covering the upper body.

Botanical Ribs Lily Flower Vine Swirl

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 learn the island's lilies by their smell before you see them, a heavy sweetness that comes up the cliff path on the wind the week the last boat leaves. Your grandmother always said they were carried over in a ship's hold two centuries back and never asked permission to stay. Every June they open along the walls of the lower garden, three to a stem, and the bees go drunk on them.

Keep reading

The vine is the trouble. Bindweed, Harold at the post office calls it, though he has never managed to pull it out of his own hedge. It climbs the gateposts, loops round the chapel railings and creeps up the side of the lighthouse store as if it has a plan. You spend each spring cutting it back with your mother's secateurs, and every time you turn round the curls have crept another yard.

The letter arrives on a Tuesday ferry, in the careful hand of a solicitor in Penzance. The cottage at the top of the lane is yours if you want it. You read it twice on the quay and tell the gulls you do not want it. Then you walk up anyway, past the lily garden, where the stems have grown as tall as a child and the blooms hang heavy in the dusk, shaded grey at their hearts as if someone had worked them in pencil and left them out in the rain.

Inside, the kitchen smells of damp and lavender. You open the back door and find the vine has come through the broken pane, curling round the sill like a question. You leave it there. Some things on an island are only borrowed, and you have learned to let the flowers keep what they have taken.