Colour tattoo of an orange lily with black swirling stems and black RIP script lettering on the top of a foot, with a second swirl tattoo partly visible at the top of the frame.

Orange lily and RIP script on a foot

Botanical · Other · Colour · Photo

The main subject is an orange lily with a red-tipped bud, drawn with dark outlines and shaded in yellow, orange and red. Black swirling vine lines curl from the stem and bud, and the black script letters R, I and P sit beside them on the foot. A second foot with orange and red scroll designs is partly visible at the top, against a dark background.

Botanical Lettering Other Lily Flower Swirl Vine Script Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the cake, because I've been asked to tell the one about the lily and the stubborn lighthouse keeper, and I'll not be hurried by anybody with a glass in their hand. My grandmother told it to me on the chapel step the day they carried her husband up the hill, and she told it the way I'm telling it now, slow, so you can taste the salt.

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There was a keeper called Edwin Vosper who lived above the harbour at Porthgwidden with his wife Nessa and a garden no bigger than a bedsheet. Nessa grew orange lilies along the wall because the wind couldn't flatten them. They quarrelled about everything else: the price of coal, whether the gulls were thieves, whether the bell in the tower rang true. But every spring the lilies came up, and every spring Edwin climbed the wall with a bucket of seaweed for her roots and said nothing at all, which was his way of saying sorry.

One November the storm took the top off the lighthouse and Edwin along with it. Nessa sat with the sea three days before she could cut a single stem. When at last she went out, she found a curl of black vine running from the root toward the front step, and at its end a bud just beginning to blush red at the tip. She fetched the mason's chisel and cut three letters into the lintel above the door, R, I, P, and she said they stood for Rest In Patience, because that was what Edwin had never once managed.

So every spring since, a bucket of seaweed goes on that step, and the bud opens on whatever day the family needs it. Look, Dilys, the lily's up. Go on, lift your glass to the keeper, and then, for pity's sake, somebody bring the bride a chair.