Pencil sketch of a tattoo design showing two lilies and a small blossom joined by swirling linework, drawn in black and grey shading.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pencil sketch of lilies and swirling flourishes

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A graphite pencil drawing of a tattoo design with a large lily at the lower centre and a smaller five-petalled blossom to the upper right, connected by curling scroll-like lines. Shading uses soft grey tones and dark pencil strokes to suggest depth behind the flowers and along the petals. The composition is a tall, vertical arrangement on a pale background with no text or border.

Botanical Traditional Lily Blossom Flower Swirl Scroll Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lily came up through the shingle at Hollow Ness the spring after the Mary Dunn went down, and nobody in the village would cut it. Old Tamsin Reid said it had grown from the spot where the boat's bell had rolled into the crack of the slipway, and that the bell had been ringing under the stones ever since, which was why the gulls got so loud at dusk.

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Her grandson Alec thought this nonsense, and said so at the Pilot's Rest, where the men were arguing over the price of herring. He was twenty and had never been out past the breakwater in a storm. He took his father's spade and went down the beach one grey morning with the intention of clearing the thing out. The stem was thin and curled at the top like a fern uncoiling, and at the head of it hung a bloom with six fat petals, speckled dark inside, and the petals bent back as if they had been caught in a gust and held there.

He struck the spade in. Under the roots there was no bell, only a small tin box, rusted shut, and inside it a wet folded paper in a hand he knew from the parish ledger. It was his own grandfather's, and it said only that the tide had turned early and that he had gone back for the lantern. Alec sat down on the shingle for a long while. When he went home he left the lily standing, and that year the men who sailed out from Hollow Ness began to leave a lantern lit on the slipway until the last boat was in.