Black and grey realistic lily tattoo on an upper thigh, with script lettering reading Learn from yesterday, Live for today and Hope for tomorrow.

Lily cluster with quote on thigh

Realism · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A cluster of three lily flowers climbs diagonally down the outer thigh, with a fourth bloom at the base, each petal shaded in soft greys with fine stamens drawn in dark ink. Three lines of cursive script sit to the right and above the flowers, reading Learn from yesterday, Live for today and Hope for tomorrow. The image is a close, straight-on photograph against a dark background, with the black and grey shading clearly visible across the skin.

Realism Lettering Botanical Thigh Lily Flower Script Quote Lettering Stamen Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mara had painted the sign for the Ferrier and Daughters Travelling Fair every spring for eleven years, and every spring the old board came off the lorry with fresh cracks in it. This year the lettering was for the big ride's canvas, and the words had been her mother's, scratched into the back of a tin tray: Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. Her mother had sold lilies from a barrow outside the Lancaster gates for thirty years, and she used to say the flowers were the only honest thing a person could carry around.

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Mara worked in the back of the dodgem tent with a brush in one hand and a jar of grey wash in the other, shading the petals so the light seemed to come from the left. Her father had taught her that. Keep the dark in the throat of the bloom, he used to say, and the rest takes care of itself. She had not meant to paint the stamens so fine, each one a pinprick of ink, but the brush had a mind of its own when she was tired.

On the last night before the caravans rolled east, a boy from the Waltzer crew ducked in out of the rain with a split lip and asked what the writing meant. Mara wiped her brush on a rag and told him it was a tune her mother used to hum. He read the words again, slowly, moving his lips like a child at school, and then he went back out into the wet without a word.

The next morning the canvas was rolled and gone, and on the gatepost someone had chalked a single lily, its stamens drawn in neat dark strokes.