Black ink pen sketch of a lily flower with a curving stem and stamens, drawn on a page of a spiral notebook, shown as a botanical tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lily flower design in pen on notebook paper

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A pen drawing of a lily in full bloom, with its petals, central stamens and anthers shown in outline. The stem curves down and to the right, with the petals shaded by fine hatching and cross-hatching. The drawing is in black ink on white paper, with a spiral notebook binding visible along the left edge.

Botanical Fine line Lily Flower Stamen Stem Petal

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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

Mrs Ottoline Pike had never drawn anything she couldn't see from her kitchen window, so when the lily came up through the cracked patio that April, she sat on the back step with a biro and a spiral pad and tried to get it down before the rain did. The petals were the hard part. She kept making them too neat, like ironed linen, until her grandson Tomas leaned over her shoulder and said they looked as if they were trying to climb out of the page.

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She hatched the shadows inside each petal, row on row, the way the man at the evening class had shown her, and she left the stamens until last, pressing each anther into a small black full stop. The stem she let run off the bottom of the paper, curving down and to the right as though it had somewhere more important to be. Tomas asked why it leaned away like that. She told him lilies never stayed where you planted them, and that was the only reason she needed.

The bulb split that autumn and spread along the fence in a row of pale green spears, and Tomas carried the pad off to his own room, where he said it belonged to the flowers now. When he gave it back at Christmas, she turned the pages slowly. Near the back, held up to the window light, she could just make out a second lily pressed faintly into the sheet, its petals drawn with the same heavy hand, its stem curling off the edge the same way. She had no memory of drawing it. She decided that was the one she would finish.