Black and grey lily of the valley tattoo on the upper arm, drawn in fine line with dotwork shading on the leaf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lily of the valley on the upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A stem of lily of the valley with several drooping bell-shaped flowers and a long, broad leaf runs diagonally down the arm. The flowers and stem are outlined in fine black linework, while the leaf is shaded with stippled dots that create gentle tonal depth. The plain black and grey palette sits against smooth skin, and a blurred indoor background with a person in a grey top is visible behind it.

Botanical Dotwork Upper arm Flower Leaf Stem

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

The steward's cart has rattled down the valley road, and you are alone in the nave of Carrow Keep with a trowel and a bucket you have no intention of filling with nettles. Nobody has tended this ground since the roof came down the winter your mother was a girl. Yet under the broken east window the lilies of the valley have come up in their usual shameless drifts, a green tide of leaves and white bells that smells sweeter than it should.

Keep reading

Your grandmother told you never to put them in your mouth, never to stand them in water for a sickroom, never to let them near the milk. Flowers that pretty are generally lying about something, she said. You remember that as you crouch and sort the stems, trying not to tear the leaves. The one you lift has a single bell drooping at the top, and the leaf beside it is broad and cupped, dotted with dew the rain left under the arch and the sun never quite reached.

The new owner, Thomas Ashe, arrives at noon with a clipboard and a roll of plans. He wants the graves cleared and the chapel floored by spring. He asks what the flowers are, and you tell him the truth, which is that they were here first. He laughs and says a garden is only a list of things that haven't died yet.

When his car has gone, you cut one stem, the longest, and lay it across the flat stone that marks no one. The bells face the earth. The sky over the walls has turned the colour of pewter, and the topmost bell is already folding back into its leaves, as if it had been waiting for someone to notice.