Colour tattoo of a pink lily with green leaves, blue and green butterflies and black music notes and treble clefs on the inner forearm, in a botanical style.

Lily, butterflies and music notes on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A pink stargazer lily with speckled petals and green leaves sits at the centre, with a blue butterfly and a green butterfly beside it. Black linework forms music notes, treble clefs and swirling scrollwork above and below the flower. Pink, green and blue ink dominate the flower and butterflies, with bold black outlines throughout the composition.

Botanical Forearm Lily Flower Butterfly Music note Treble clef Leaves Swirl Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The seed came up through the grating of the third habitat in the spring the water stopped singing, and nobody in Coldharbour Ring had seen a flower since the old dome was sealed. Maud Ferrier knelt beside it with her tuning fork in her apron pocket and told the children to keep their boots off the bed.

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The lily grew tall and pink, its petals freckled like a thrush's egg, and by midsummer two butterflies came down the air shaft, one blue as a cooled furnace, one green as the lichen on the north wall. They did not feed. They sat on the leaves and turned their wings slowly, and whenever Maud hummed a note they lifted and went round the stamens as if counting them.

The men of the ring said a flower that sang was bad luck, and they came with their rakes. Maud stood in the path with her fork raised and said the flower had never sung. It had only been waiting for someone to write down what the butterflies were hearing. So Eli Dunmore, the youngest, who could not read a bar of music, sat cross-legged in the dirt and drew curling notes on the wall in soot, and each one he drew, a butterfly came down to rest on.

When the air shaft was finally opened to the stars, the wall was covered in clefs and swirls, and the lily had dropped its freckles and gone pale at the throat. Maud said that was how you knew the song was finished. Eli still sits under it on wet evenings, humming his wrong notes, and the butterflies still come down for those.