Pencil drawing of a lily flower with curling vine swirls, a tattoo flash design in black and grey shading.

Lily with swirling vines in pencil

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil sketch of a lily with six pointed petals, stamens and a curved pistil, set among fine looping vines and curled tendrils. The linework is crisp and uniform, with soft graphite shading along the petal edges and centre to give volume. The drawing is in greyscale on a plain white background and the composition is an asymmetric spray rising from the lower left, sized as a standalone design.

Fine line Botanical Lily Flower Vine Swirl Stamen Tendril

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boats of Gullan Haven went out before the gulls woke, eleven of them in the year the Mary Ann was lost, and nobody in the village would say aloud what had taken her. Old Tam Rudd said the sea had wanted a lily for its table, which was why the white flower grew each summer from the cracks in the harbour wall, pale and six-pointed, with its stamens standing up like pins in a sailmaker's cushion.

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His granddaughter Nell did not believe in tables. She believed in rope. Every evening that spring she climbed the wall with a coil of tarred twine and wound it round the lily's stalk, then round the iron mooring ring, then round her own wrist until the skin burned. The vines came with her, she swore, looping over the stones and up the ring as if they were learning the knots from her. The men laughed at her from the net sheds, but they stopped laughing when the tendrils began to hold the hawsers steady in the swell.

The Mary Ann came back in June. Nobody had given her up, only waited. She rode in low with her nets full and her skipper grey-faced and grinning, and when the crew threw their lines up to the wall, every one caught on the curled tendrils and held fast. Nell untangled them one by one. Pollen from the lily had dusted her fingers gold, and it did not wash off for days.

That night she carried the spare coil back up to the wall and left it at the foot of the flower, where the tide could reach it and take it if it chose. In the morning the twine was gone, and the lily had put out two new buds, both turned towards the sea.