Watercolour-style botanical tattoo of pink lilies and sweeping black linework across a person's upper back and side, with blue accents.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pink lilies and black swirls across a back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows large pink lily-like flowers with soft, blended shading, linked by long, sweeping black lines that curl up the back. Small blue-grey strokes sit among the petals, and a lower pink bloom sits near the side of the torso. The composition runs diagonally from the lower left to the upper right, with the flowers framed by the bare skin of the back.

Botanical Back Lily Flower Petal Swirl Linework

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lilies came up along Harrow Drove the week after the leaves had gone, which my father called bad manners, flowers arriving at a party nobody had invited them to. Bare stems, six or seven to a clump, the petals peeled back as if they were trying to get out of a wind that wasn't blowing. By September the whole ditch bank looked like someone had dropped a handful of pink matches in the nettles.

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Dunmore wanted the drain cleared before the pumps went on in October. He said he would pay me by the hour if I lifted the bulbs first and took them somewhere they wouldn't drown, so I went down on my knees with a fork and a bucket and the smell of wet silt coming up at me. The bulbs were the size of pickled onions, and their roots came away like wire, black and tangled, each one tugging at the next as though they had agreed to stay together.

On the eighth clump I found a line of them running not with the ditch but straight across the field toward the old farmhouse, a crooked path of bulbs thirty yards long. Somebody had planted them to be seen from a window. I knelt there with the fork in my hand and thought about Ellen Waite, whose name I had only ever read on the post box, and who had died the winter I was born.

I didn't take them to the allotments after all. I carried the bucket back up the path and set each bulb in the earth beneath her window, deep enough that the pumps couldn't reach them. When the first frost came I went out in the dark to see if anything had survived, and nothing showed. But the following September the stems pushed up through the blackened grass, bare and pink, curling toward the glass as though they had been waiting for someone to look out.