Black and grey realism tattoo of two lily flowers with detailed stamens on the forearm, shown against a pale wooden deck.

Lily blossoms on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two open lily flowers with their petals, curled edges and dark stamens drawn in fine detail, with a third bloom partly fading behind them. The shading is soft and built up with stippled dots, giving the petals volume against the pale skin. The design is in black ink and grey tones and sits diagonally across the outer forearm, with a wristband visible at the edge of the frame.

Botanical Realism Dotwork Forearm Lily Flower Stamen Petal Blossom

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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

Mind the step, it's loose, and don't let the draught get at the lamp. There. Now you'll want to hear about the bulb my father carried up from the valley in his coat pocket, because the frost had taken the rest of the field that year and he was too stubborn to watch it go. He kept it in a jam jar of sand in the cellar under the byre, cold enough to make your teeth ache. Every morning he went down with a candle and laid his palm on the sand to feel whether it was still breathing.

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February came in hard. The ice on the trough was thick enough to walk on, and the ewes lambed in the snow with their breath smoking. Still he went down. Your grandmother said he was mad, talking to a bulb as if it owed him an answer. He told her a lily keeps its promises better than most men, and it only asks to be left in the dark until the light is worth coming back for.

Come March, a pale green point pushed through the sand, then a second, and when the hedges were still bare he carried the jar up to the kitchen window. Three weeks later the first bloom opened, white going to cream at the edges, with a crown of dark stamens dusted like soot. A second bloom came up behind it, and a third that never quite finished, folded and fading at the back of the stem.

That's the cellar lily for you. Now the kettle, and mind that cat, she's been sitting on my boots since dawn.