Black and grey realism tattoo of a lily on the side ribs, with shaded petals and detailed stamens.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lily tattoo on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A large lily flower is tattooed on the side of the torso, with its open petals curling outward and its stamens drawn in fine detail. The petals are built up with soft grey shading and highlights that give them volume and a realistic, three-dimensional look. The flower fills the centre of the frame against a plain skin background, with a white top at the top edge and a belly button piercing visible below.

Realism Botanical Ribs Lily Flower Stamen Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lilies came aboard at Falmouth in a crate meant for a chandler in Valparaíso, and by the second day out the whole galley smelled of them. Nobody had ordered flowers. Cook Hobday swore they were bad luck on a ship and would have thrown them over the side if the mate hadn't paid for them out of his own pocket.

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I kept them on the shelf above the range, where the steam could reach their petals. They were grey in the lamplight, grey as slate, though the crate label had said white. Each morning I found another bloom had opened in the night, curling back on itself like a sleeve rolled up for work, and the stamens stood out long and dusted with pollen that marked the bread dough if I wasn't careful.

In the third week the glass dropped and we ran into weather off the Horn. Everything not lashed went sliding. The crate split and the bulbs rolled into the bilge water. I went down after them with a lantern clamped in my teeth, and when I climbed back up with my hands full of wet earth I found the cook's boy, Teague, a lad of fifteen, crying over a petal he'd tried to save in his shirt.

We made a poor voyage that year, but the lilies rooted in a biscuit tin on the galley table, and when we reached port I carried the tin ashore under my arm. Teague still keeps the one grey bloom I pressed between the pages of his Bible. It is the only thing I ever owned that survived the Horn.