Colour Japanese style sleeve tattoo on an upper arm and shoulder, with orange tiger lilies, purple flowers, green leaves and grey waves.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lily and waves sleeve tattoo

Japanese · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A full sleeve tattoo covers the upper arm and shoulder, centred on two orange tiger lilies and a cluster of purple five-petalled flowers with green leaves. Grey shaded waves and wind lines frame the flowers, and the bold black outlines are softened by smooth, blended shading. Bright reds, oranges, purples and greens dominate against the dark grey background of the water and wind.

Japanese Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Lily Flower Leaves Wave Wind

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the pair of you, and mind the tea, it's stewed. You want the story or you want a biscuit? Story first, then the biscuit, that's how my mother did it. So. Harrow Point had nine floors of grey and one stubborn woman on the eleventh, and her name was Nell Ashby, who grew lilies in a bath.

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She got the bulbs off a lorry driver who owed her for mending his daughter's coat. Orange ones, speckled like a trout, which Nell swore had come up from the old marshes where the river used to reach the bottom of the estate. Every March she filled that bath with compost and tap water and waited. The council men said the balcony would come down. Mr Okafor from fourteen said the lilies were a fire hazard. Nell said the wind would decide, because up there the wind decided everything. It blew hard off the canal, bringing spray and gulls and the grey curl of waves painted on the lift doors.

The purple ones came later, from Dolores on the sixth, who tossed cuttings out of her window to see what would catch. Something always does. By summer the lilies had climbed the railings, orange as a fire engine, and the purple clusters had rooted in the gutters, leaves fat with rain. One August afternoon the wind dropped, the gulls went quiet, and the whole block seemed to hold its breath.

When the demolition letter came, Nell read it aloud in the lift and then folded it into a paper boat. She set it on the canal wall and watched the current take it. Next spring, nobody remembers who did it, a line of lilies came up through the cracked concrete beside the water, tiger-striped and burning. Mind your step on that path, love. That's where the wind keeps its best flowers.