Colour tattoo of orange tiger lilies with black scrolling vines across the upper arm and shoulder.

Orange tiger lilies with vines on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a cluster of four orange tiger lilies with red speckled petals, yellow stamens and dark outlines, arranged down the upper arm. Black swirling vines with curled tendrils wrap around the lilies and fill the spaces between them. The petals use soft orange and yellow shading with red highlights, and the composition runs diagonally from the shoulder towards the elbow.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bucket by the barrier at Halford Junction holds eleven tiger lilies on a Thursday, and by six o'clock you have learned to count them the way other people count change. The orange is too loud for the grey platform. Pollen gets onto your cuffs and the backs of your hands, dusting the sleeves of your green overall, and the commuters walk past it without seeing it.

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Mrs Ansell comes every week at twenty to six, buys one lily, and asks you to rub the speckles off the petals with your thumb, which you never do. She says her husband always called tiger lilies the only flowers honest enough to show their stamens. Then she waits for the 17:52 to Carlisle, though she never boards it, and studies the iron brackets of the canopy, curled like tendrils over the ticket hall, as if they might grow down and take hold of the train.

This Thursday the bucket is full and the platform is empty. At quarter to six you wrap her lily in brown paper, tuck it inside your coat, and stand where she always stands. The 17:52 pulls out with its lights on. Somewhere a wheel squeals against the rail. You hold the flower loosely, the way you were taught, and feel the stamens brush your wrist.

When the last commuter has gone, you lock the stall and look up. A fresh curl of rust has started on the nearest bracket, climbing towards the next one, and you think it is the most patient thing in the building.

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