Black linework botanical tattoo of lilies, a chrysanthemum, a daisy and a carnation with swirling stems across a woman's upper back and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lily, chrysanthemum and daisy flowers on a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A woman's upper back and shoulder carry a cluster of flowers drawn in black outline, including a lily, a chrysanthemum, a large daisy and a carnation, joined by curling stems and swirls. The lines are bold and even with some dot stippling in the lily, and the tattoo is left unshaded so the skin shows between the petals. The composition runs diagonally from the top of the shoulder down towards the shoulder blade, with the background dark blue.

Botanical Shoulder Lily Chrysanthemum Daisy Carnation Flower Swirl Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Abbot had the seed catalogue spread across the kitchen table when the post boat's bell rang over the water, and she was still arguing with the printer's proof. The lilies were wrong. Her father had drawn them in plain outline, every stamen and every speck of dotted shading, and the printer wanted them filled in grey so they would show on the cheap paper. "Leave the white in," she told the man down the line from the chandlery. "Let the page do the petals."

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Her father had taught her that with a steel nib and a bottle of Indian ink. The summer the herring failed, he had drawn the whole back garden for a nursery in Bristol: a chrysanthemum like a firework caught halfway through its burst, a daisy as wide as a dinner plate, a carnation nodding over the wall, and a lily leaning in from the edge as if it had heard the gossip. He joined them all with curling stems that ran off the sheet, because, he said, nothing good in a garden ever stopped where you wanted it to.

The nursery sent the proofs back with a note asking for colour. Nell took the sheet down to the end of the pier instead, pinned it under a flat stone, and watched the wind try to lift it. Gulls came and sat on the rail to look. A fisherman's boy asked her what the flowers were for, and she said they were for people who had forgotten what gardens looked like in winter.

When the catalogue came out, the orders poured in, and most of the letters asked where the colour had gone. Nell wrote back to each one in the same careful hand: the petals are left empty where the light is.