Black and grey Botanical lily tattoo with one teal flower and curling tendril lines on the side of a torso, above a studded waistband.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lily tattoo on the side of the torso

Botanical · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows two large lily flowers drawn in bold black outlines with grey shading, with a single lily highlighted in teal and green. Thin curling tendril lines sweep up from the flowers towards the top of the frame. The image is shot in black and white except for the teal flower, which draws the eye to the centre of the composition.

Botanical Ribs Lily Flower Tendril Swirl Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Harbour fog had swallowed the quay by the time Nell Ashdown counted the boats in, and she counted them twice because the Mary Ellen was late. Her father had always said the sea kept its own tally, and that you learned to read the water before you read the ledger. So she stood on the wet stones with her shawl pulled tight and watched the grey shapes nose through the mouth of the harbour, one, two, three, until there was a gap where the fourth should be.

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The lily was her uncle's idea. Thomas painted boats for the fleet through the winter, sea-grey hulls and white trim, and the only colour anyone asked for was the red of a lifebuoy. But the year the Mary Ellen's engine failed off the Dogger Bank, he had put a single lily on her transom in a green so bright it looked wet, edged in black ink the way he drew the stems on the cemetery wreaths. He said a boat needed one thing you could see from a long way off. Nobody argued with Thomas about paint.

The fourth boat came in at half past six, low in the water and trailing a rope like a ribbon. Nell did not run. She had learned that from the widows on the quay, who knew the difference between a boat that was late and one that was not coming. She walked down to the slipway with her hands in her pockets and saw the lily first, a patch of teal through the murk, then the men.

Her father was not in the wheelhouse. He sat on the gunwale with his cap in his lap, and when he looked up he was grinning like a fool at the colour on the stern, as if Thomas had painted it for him alone. "Your uncle's luck," he said. "Still holding."