Colour realism tattoo of pink lilies, a tulip bud and two butterflies across the top of a foot, with script lettering beside them.

Pink lilies and butterflies on a foot

Realism · Other · Colour · Photo

A colour tattoo of two pink lilies with dark stamens, a closed pink tulip bud and green leaves, covering the top of a bare foot. Two butterflies, one black and grey with pale wings and one smaller grey and black, sit among the flowers, and black script lettering reads Puddie beside the lilies. Soft shading gives the petals and leaves depth, and the photo shows the design against a pale wooden surface.

Realism Botanical Other Lily Tulip Butterfly Leaves Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Hollis had sold bulbs from the same cart at Tenterden for thirty-one years, and she still said the lilies were the ones that made her. Her husband had brought back a crate of Stargazers from a Dutch nursery the spring the war ended, and not one of them would flower. He dug them out in June and threw them on the compost heap behind the greenhouse, where they rotted sulkily all summer.

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Then the butterflies came. Nobody had planted anything for them. The tulips had gone in too late and the nettles had got into the wall. One morning in August a pale pair of wings came down over the heap, then a smaller grey and black pair, and they settled on the thing that had been thrown away and started to feed as if it had been waiting for them.

She didn't tell her husband. She dug the bulbs back into the bed under the glass and watered them with the washing-up water, and by the next June they stood spotted and heavy-headed, their stamens dusted orange, with a single pink tulip bud leaning beside them like a child who had been told to wait outside.

Her husband stopped at the gate with the post in his hand and looked for a long while. "They always did want the rubbish," she said, and he laughed, and the butterflies kept working at the flowers as though the whole garden had been laid out for them.