Realism full sleeve tattoo on an upper arm and shoulder, with large orange lilies, skulls and green leaves on a dark background.

Orange lily and skull full sleeve

Realism · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A four-panel collage showing a full sleeve tattoo from shoulder to forearm. Large orange lilies sit at the top of the shoulder, with skulls, orange flowers and green leaves running down the arm against a near-black background. The shading is smooth and realistic, with strong highlights on the petals and soft gradients on the skulls.

Realism Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Forearm Lily Skull Flower Leaves Sleeve

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mags had the boat hook in one hand and the tiller in the other when the first lily came up through the towpath cracks, its orange head nodding over the water as if it had been waiting for someone to notice. She didn't stop. Her father never stopped for flowers on the cut, and he always said a bargeman who slowed for beauty ended up in the reeds with a broken back and nothing to show for it.

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The Ellen Marie had come down from Stourport with a hold full of coal and a skull nailed to the wheelhouse, a thing her uncle Ivo swore brought luck. Nobody believed him. The skull had a crack across the brow and two hollow eyes that caught the lamplight after dark, and Mags had long since stopped minding it. Lilies grew thick around the lock gates in July, heavy and rust-coloured, and the lockkeeper's wife pressed the petals into a book that smelled of diesel and marmalade.

On the last lock before Gloucester the skull was gone. Ivo swore he'd seen the lockkeeper's girl climbing the ladder, but the girl only ever wanted the lilies. Mags found it the next morning in the bed beside the gates, half sunk in leaf mould, with a bloom pushed through each eye socket like a pair of spectacles someone had dropped in the dark.

She left it there. She picked the biggest flower, the one with the brightest throat, and tucked it behind the tiller where the wind couldn't have it. Ivo would say the skull had chosen its own cargo. Ivo could say what he liked. The boat ran lighter for it, or Mags told herself so, and by evening the petals had turned the colour of the sunset over the Severn.