Black and grey shaded lily flowers with swirling leaves tattooed along the side ribs.

Lily flowers on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

Two lily-style flowers are tattooed down the side of the ribs, with the upper bloom larger and the lower one smaller. Fine outlines are combined with soft grey shading on the petals, and curling leaf strokes frame the flowers. The design is entirely black and grey and fills most of the frame against a pale background.

Botanical Ribs Lily Flower Leaves Swirl Petal

Find an artist for this

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

Sit, sit, the kettle's warm and the barrier won't lift before the bell, so you have time for the lily. Everyone asks for the lily. On the river where two countries pretended not to share a bank stood a customs hut with a tin roof, and a clerk there named Istvan Varga kept a jam jar on his desk with one bulb in it, pale and papery. His mother had told him a bulb carried over a border would open wherever it was finally set down.

Keep reading

Nobody declared anything in those days except the weather. One wet autumn a woman came through with a shopping bag and a face like she had been running for a week. Istvan asked what she carried. She said her grandmother's things, and he looked in the bag and found only a tin of bulbs, grey with river dust. He stamped her papers twice, which he never did, and she pressed the tin into his hands and was up the gravel road before the bell.

In spring he planted them along the wall where the rain ran off. The first year gave leaves only, long and curled like pen strokes that had lost their nerve. The second year two stems rose, one tall and one lower and shyer, and the blooms opened pale as ink washed thin on paper, every petal veined in a darker grey, as if they had been drawn in pencil and left out in the damp.

When the new bridge came and the hut was knocked down, the lilies were the last thing standing. Istvan dug one up, wrapped its roots in a stamped customs form, and carried it across. It grows in my yard now, which is how I know the mother was right. Drink your tea before the bell goes.