Black and grey botanical tattoo of lilies with sketched linework and ink splatter across the upper back, near the neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lily bouquet across upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two large lily blooms with long stems and leaves, forming a bouquet that spreads across the upper back and toward the neck. The linework is loose and sketchy, with shading in the petals and dark ink splatter around the flowers. The image is entirely black and grey and the composition is centred on the back, with a dark background and black shoulder straps.

Botanical Blackwork Back Lily Flower Bouquet Stem Leaf Ink splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mother Kessock kept the light on Scarrow Head for thirty-one winters, and when her husband went out after the herring boats and did not come back, she kept it on alone. The island had no soil worth the name, only grey shale and gull lime. So in the spring she carried a sack of bulbs up the cliff path, the ones a tinker had left in exchange for a tin of lamp oil, and she pushed them into a crack behind the lamp house where the wind could not reach.

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They came up pale, then tall, two stems that split at the top into great open bells, and the sea wind bent them until they lay nearly flat against the rock. Every night the lamp swept over them. The fishermen said the light had grown a garden, which was not true, but the lilies did not mind what was said of them. When the storm came in October, the sea threw black weed and spray over the gallery, and in the morning the petals were smeared dark where the water had struck, as if someone had flicked ink across the page.

A boy rowed out from the mainland that week to ask for the light to be kept burning on the eastern reef, where his brother's boat had gone down in the same gale. Mother Kessock gave him oil and a lantern and sent him up the stair with them. "Bring me one bloom if the light holds," she said. He came down at dawn with the lantern cold and a single stem in his fist, black at the cut end where the storm had dried on it. She took it without asking whether he had found his brother. She knew from the way he held the boat's rope that he had not.

She set the stem in the crack behind the lamp house, where the wind could not reach, and it came up white again the following spring.