Sketch-style fine line tattoo of three pink lilies, buds and curling vines across the upper back and shoulder blade, with black linework and pink wash.

Pink lilies and vines across a back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

Three pink lilies with buds sit on loose, curling stems that run down the upper back and across the shoulder blade. The black linework is thin and sketchy, with some stems left open, while the petals are filled with pink wash that bleeds past the outlines in places. The subject fills the frame against a plain light skin tone and dark background.

Botanical Fine line Back Lily Flower Vine Spiral Bud Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ada Pell had painted lilies for the Harbour Seed Company for thirty-one years, and in all that time the flowers had never once held still for her. She set a stem in the blue jug on the sill above the quay, and by the time she had fetched her sable brush the petals had turned to follow the gulls on the slipway. Her pencil drawings were careful and nervous. The stems looped where the plant had wandered, and she followed them as far as they would go, then stopped.

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The summer the Corrigan boy knocked a tin of carmine off her step, she stopped being careful. He was sixteen and mortified, and he scrubbed the flagstones with a bucket of sea water while she laughed in the doorway. That evening he came back with three lilies from his grandmother's allotment, each with a closed bud, and she sat down with them and washed the pink straight across her pencil lines. The colour bled past the edges where the paper drank it up, and for once she did not reach for an eraser.

The seed company sent the plates back with a letter asking for something neater. She posted them anyway with a note saying the flowers had insisted. Nobody on the quay thought much of it, but the boy came every Thursday after that to carry her paints up the hill, and he learned to hold a brush the way she did, loose at the wrist, letting the water decide.

When Ada died, the merchant's man found her last drawing still pinned to the board. The big lily leaned out of the page with its pink running off the petals, and at the foot of the stem the spiral was left open, not closed. Beside it she had written in small pencil capitals, LEAVE IT GROWING. The boy kept that one.