Watercolour style tattoo of pink lilies with blue stamens and black sweeping stems across a person's upper back and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pink lilies and black stems on a back

Neo-trad · Back · Mixed · Photo

A back tattoo of three pink lily-like flowers with blue stamens, joined by sweeping black stems that curve from the upper shoulder down the spine. The flowers are shaded with soft, blended pink and red tones, while the stems use bold, solid black lines with ragged, brushed edges. The design runs diagonally across the back and leaves most of the skin around it bare.

Neo-trad Back Lily Flower Stem Petal Stamen

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lilies came up every year in the ruined chapel at Carrow Hill, though nobody had planted them since the monks left. Old Hannah Tull said they were the spirits of the brothers who had sung the hours there, and the children said they were only weeds with ambitions. In the spring the stems rose black through the broken flagstones, curling toward the light the way ink curls in water.

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When the miller's daughter, Ness Corran, came up the hill that April with a bucket of lime for her father's wall, she found the chapel door open and a woman sitting on the altar step, brushing black paint from her fingers with a rag. The woman said she was painting the stems to keep them from wandering off the hill. Ness asked why the flowers were pink and the woman said that was the only colour the old bishop had left them, and it had faded in the rain.

Ness went home and told her father what she had seen. He laughed and gave her a loaf for the road. But the next morning the lime bucket was full of pink petals, and the wall she had meant to mend was bare stone, with a single black stem drawn across it from the top to the foot, as clean as a sentence.

The lilies are still there on Carrow Hill, though the chapel roof has fallen in. Ness kept the stem that wandered down her father's wall, and when she died it was still wet.