Colour tattoo of pink lilies and a hummingbird on the side of the ribs, with shaded petals and a teal wash behind the flowers.

Pink lilies and hummingbird on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Colour · Photo

Four pink lilies climb diagonally across the side of the torso, with a small hummingbird in green and purple feeding from the uppermost bloom. The petals are shaded with darker pink and magenta, and orange stamens and dark outlines give the flowers depth. A soft teal wash sits behind the lilies, and the hummingbird adds a lighter accent at the top right of the composition.

Botanical Realism Ribs Lily Flower Hummingbird Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The keeper's wife would not leave the rock, though the sea took two boats off the point that winter and the mainland offered her a room in Penzance. She planted lilies instead, carrying tubs of them up the stair one at a time, and every bulb she set in the crack below the lamp room came up pink by midsummer, as if the salt had asked them to.

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Her husband laughed at the flowers. He laughed less when the fog came in thick enough to hide the lamp from the boats. He was out on the gallery with the horn wheezing and his hands gone numb when a small green bird came out of the murk and hung in the air beside his face. It was no bird that lived on the island. Its throat flickered like a struck match, and it looked at him the way his wife looked at him when he forgot the kettle.

It dropped to the lilies and fed from the topmost bloom, then rose and went west, slow enough that he could follow it with his eyes. He went in and lit the great lens by hand, the way he had been taught, and he kept it burning until the grey shape of the Mary Ellen came round the point with its lantern swinging. Then he sat on the bottom stair with salt in his mouth and waited for his legs to stop shaking.

At dawn his wife found the lilies bowed all one way, towards the sea, and a single green feather lying on the window sill. She picked it up, looked at it a long while, and said nothing. Then she went down for another tub of bulbs and planted a row along the west wall, so that whatever came through the fog next would have something to feed from on the way.