Pencil drawing of a tattoo design showing a lily with shaded petals and black tribal-style swirls, with no body placement shown.

Lily with tribal swirls design drawing

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a single open lily with shaded petals, visible stamens and pointed leaves, set against sweeping black tribal-style swirls that run up and down the sheet. The petals are rendered in soft graded grey pencil while the swirls are filled with dense, solid black. The lily sits in the upper centre of the page with the swirls wrapping around its stem and leaves on a plain white background.

Botanical Lily Flower Stamen Leaves Design

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lily arrived on Ward 9 at ten past two, when the flower shop on the high street had been shut for six hours and the porter signed for it anyway. Nobody had sent a name. The card said only: for the window bed, from the one who stayed late. Mrs Adeyemi in bed four was asleep, so I put the stems in a jug of cold water beside her locker, because the staff room kettle had gone off and I wanted something to do with my hands.

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Night shifts teach you to read shapes in the dark. The petals went pale against the blind, and the black stems I hadn't noticed before ran off the edge of the paper wrap in long hooks, as if someone had inked them while waiting for a call. I counted the obs, took a pulse, wrote the numbers in the wrong column and crossed them out. Down the corridor a buzzer went and stopped, and then another went.

At four Mrs Adeyemi woke and asked whether the flowers were from her son. I said I didn't know. She said he always forgot the card, and smiled at the lily as though it had answered her. She asked me to open the blind. Beyond the car park the sky was greying at the edges, and the petals caught the first of it.

I wrote the card's words on the handover sheet under personal items, because that is where things go on a ward when they cannot be filed anywhere else. By seven the jug had been moved to the nurses' station, and the day staff were already arguing about whose turn it was to bin the old ones.