Colour botanical tattoo of a pink lily, purple and pink irises and light blue forget-me-nots with green stems, on the side of a person's ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lily, iris and forget-me-not on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A pink lily, a purple iris, a pink iris and several pale blue forget-me-not flowers sit on green stems across the side of the ribcage. The linework is soft and the petals are shaded with gentle gradients in pink, violet and blue. The flowers rise diagonally up the torso against plain skin, with a red top and dark jeans at the edges of the frame.

Botanical Ribs Lily Iris Forget-me-not Flower Leaves Stem

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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

You find the box on the step on the second Tuesday of January, soaked through at one corner, the postmark smudged to a grey thumbprint. Inside, wrapped in newspaper from a county you have never visited, are six lily bulbs the colour of old onions, two iris rhizomes, and a packet of forget-me-not seed your mother ordered in the autumn before she went into the home in Carlisle. The order form is still folded in with them, her capitals pressed hard enough to dent the paper.

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The ground is iron. You take the fork down to the bottom field anyway, break the crust with your heel, and dig holes the depth of a hand. Frost has got into the furrows and the ditch is skinned with ice. The ewes watch from the gate, unimpressed. You set each bulb pointed end up, the way the leaflet says, and cover them with the grey clay, which smells of rain and old iron.

Nothing happens for weeks. Rooks come and go over the barn. You stop checking. Then in late February, along the hedge where the ditch runs, something blue opens in the leaf litter: forget-me-nots, a scatter of them, pale as skimmed milk, seeded there years ago by someone who was not watching.

You kneel in the wet with the fork across your knees. Under the clay the lilies are still asleep, and you do not dig to check. You pick one flower, press it between the pages of the seed catalogue, and walk back up the track as the light goes long and yellow over the wall.