Black linework tattoo of a lily of the valley sprig with bell-shaped flowers and striped leaves, placed on the inner wrist and forearm.

Lily of the valley sprig on wrist

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A sprig of lily of the valley runs diagonally across the inner wrist, with four bell-shaped flowers hanging from a curved stem and two long, striped leaves at the base. The design is drawn in bold black outline with light shading and fine vein lines on the leaves, and it sits on pale skin against a blurred indoor background. The piece is entirely black ink with no colour.

Botanical Forearm Flower Leaves Sprig 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

Mind the step there, it's worn through where a hundred years of boots have gone up and down. You want the bench by the platform lamp, the one that still has its iron arms. Sit yourself. The last train to Harrowgate Junction left at nine, and the stationmaster's daughter, Edie Marsh, was supposed to be on it with her trunk and her mother's brooch. She wasn't. Her mother came down the lane every evening after that, carrying a bunch of lily of the valley wrapped in wet newspaper, because it was the only flower Edie had ever asked for.

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Nobody in Stanhope Road would say what happened between the two of them. The mother only said that the flowers came up every spring along the line fence, bell after bell, in the shade where the sleepers had rotted, and that she would not have them cut. The porter swore he saw a girl in a grey coat waiting on the far platform at the turn of every season, and that she always had a sprig in her hand, two broad striped leaves and four small bells bent over like they were listening for a train.

So when the new signal man came in the autumn and asked why the rose bushes were gone and the weeds were left, the old men only shook their heads and told him to leave the green things be. He didn't, of course. He dug out a clump to plant behind his cottage, and the next morning it had put its roots back under the platform edge, straight as a telegraph wire.

There's your lesson, if you want one. Some journeys don't end at the buffers. They just wait for the right kind of weather, and then they come back up through the cracks in the concrete, quiet as anything, and ring nothing at all.