Colour neo-traditional tattoo of pink lilies, a blue-shaded lotus and green swirls across the hip and thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pink lilies and lotus on a hip and thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows three pink lilies and a larger purple-blue lotus with a yellow-orange centre, joined by dark green leaves and curling green tendrils. The linework is bold and dark, with smooth gradient shading in pinks, reds and blues that gives the petals volume. The design wraps diagonally from the upper hip down the outer thigh, and the photo is a close side view of the skin.

Neo-trad Botanical Thigh Lily Lotus Flower Leaves Swirl Tendril

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You kneel in the nettles of the inner ward pulling bindweed from the dry moat steps, and Mrs Haskell at the gatehouse calls up that the lilies have come back for the first time since the siege. Nobody planted them. They simply rose through the cracked flags along the north wall, pink and heavy-headed, as though the ruin had remembered something.

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The lotus is your brother's doing. He carried its bulb home from a port on the Levant in a tin smelling of camphor and swore it would drown in English clay. He sank it in the cistern under the broken arch, where rain collects black and still, and one June morning it opened, violet at the rim with a yellow heart like a struck match. The village children climbed the hill to see it. Your brother did not stay to see it. He sold his share of the estate to a man from Leeds and left the tin on the windowsill of the solar.

The agent's letters say the castle will be sold by Michaelmas and the grounds cleared. Mrs Haskell wants the cistern drained and the lotus pulled out by the roots, since no one can say what will grow where it was. You tell her you will do it yourself. In the evening you lower the tin into the cistern and press it into the silt beneath the water, the way your brother must have done, and you wrap the lid in oilcloth so the next person who finds it will know someone wanted it to stay.