Fine line tattoo of a lily of the valley sprig with pink bell-shaped flowers on the ankle, outlined in black.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lily of the valley sprig on ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Mixed · Photo

A slender black stem curves up the outside of the ankle, bearing five bell-shaped lily of the valley flowers that hang downwards. The flowers have pale pink shading within thin black outlines, and the linework is delicate and even. The design is set against plain, light skin with a blurred, patterned fabric in the background.

Fine line Botanical Ankle Flower Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Put another log on, Ada, the wind's come round to the north and it's getting into the byre. No, not that one, the green ash spits. There. Now listen, because I'll not tell it twice, and you'll not sleep until you've heard how the bells came to the bank under the top field.

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Old Mary Coleby had a black stem for a spine and not much else. Every January she walked the frozen furrows with a spade on her shoulder, looking for the place where the snow lay thinnest. The rooks said the spring had drowned in the Wheal pond the winter the lambs died. So she dug the bank under the hedge, where the sun came over the wall first, and she set in a single root she'd carried from her mother's garden in her apron pocket, wrapped in wet brown paper.

Nobody saw it come. One morning in March the frost lay white on everything except a curve of stem bent up along the hedge, and from it hung five pale bells, each no bigger than a thimble, with a blush at the mouth as if they'd been blowing on their fingers. The hands rang them with a stick to hear if they were hollow. They weren't. They were full of the cold, and when the wind came off the hill they let it out in a sweet, thin note that made the dogs lift their heads.

Mary never told anyone the trick of it. She only said the bells would ring the spring back up the valley if you let them alone, and that if you broke one, the winter would come back for its change. Her boy Samuel snapped one off to press in his Bible. The next morning the rooks were on the roof again, and it snowed until Lady Day.