Realistic colour tattoo of an orange lily with buds and green stems on an upper arm, set against a blue background with swirling smoke and a partial face.

Orange lily with blue smoke on an arm

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A large orange lily with yellow throat, red-brown streaked petals and visible stamens dominates the design, with two buds and green stems extending to the lower left. Behind the flower, blue shading and pale swirling wisps suggest smoke, and a partial face in blue tones appears at the top right. Soft gradients and fine highlights give the petals a rounded, lifelike finish.

Realism Botanical Upper arm Lily Flower Bud Stem Leaf Smoke Portrait

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the lily first, pushed into a yoghurt pot on the fourteenth-floor walkway of Halden House, where Mrs Okafor has been feeding it water from her kettle since the lift broke in March. It is the orange kind that opens in the morning and is finished by dusk, and you have never seen one open all the way round before. Its throat is as bright as a yolk, and the stamens curl up as if they want to be counted.

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Downstairs someone is burning something that isn't allowed. The smoke climbs the stairwell in grey ropes and drifts past the railings until it takes the shape of the mural on the gable end, the painted woman with the blue face who has been looking over Crane Street since 1998. Her mouth is the only part still clear. You tell yourself it is the wind that makes her look sorry.

Mrs Okafor knocks at seven with a plate of rice and asks whether you want the bud saved for when the flower goes over. You say yes. She says it takes three days to finish opening, and that the last one she kept she pressed flat between the pages of the Gazette, and she has never been able to throw the paper out. You take the plate. The lift is still broken, so you carry it down the stairs past the smoke, and on the landing you stop to look up at the blue woman, who has not moved, while the lily stays open behind you on the walkway.