Botanical tattoo of pink lilies and dark curling vines running from the ankle across the top of a bare foot.

Pink lily vine across ankle and foot

Botanical · Ankle · Mixed · Photo

A bare foot and ankle show a botanical design of pink lily-style flowers with small buds and leaves, joined by dark black vines. The flowers are shaded with soft pink and magenta tones, while the stems and leaves are drawn in black linework. The design climbs from the ankle onto the top of the foot, with the largest flower sitting near the base of the toes against a wooden floor.

Botanical Ankle Other Lily Flower Vine Leaves Bud Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nan Tregarthen had the lily cutting in her apron pocket when the carrier's cart pulled up at the glasshouse door, and she was still cross about the frost. Four winters the bulb had sulked in its pot on the potting bench, refusing to throw a shoot, and now the thing had sent a green thread up the side of the trellis overnight, as if it had been waiting for the wind to shift.

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The vine was not a proper lily, the carrier said. He had brought the bulb from a ship's cargo at Penzance, wrapped in wet sacking with a tag that read only LILIUM, and the Portuguese merchant who sold it swore it came from a valley above Coimbra where the flowers grew red in the rock. Nan had never seen red lilies. She had seen pink ones on the chapel steps at Whitsun, pressed flat in hymnals, and she did not trust anything that bloomed in a hurry.

By June the vine had crept down the glasshouse post, across the flagstones and along the sill of the open door, budding at every joint. Black stems the thickness of cotton thread wound over everything, and on them the flowers opened pink as sea thrift, their throats dusted with a darker rose. Her grandson Jory swept the fallen petals each morning. Each evening they opened again, a little further from the house.

On the last day of the month she followed the vine out to the lane, where it had reached the old stone stile and climbed over. Nan sat on the step and cut the largest bloom, pressed it inside her hymnal, and let the rest run on toward the sea. Whatever the merchant had sold her, it had found the way out on its own, and she supposed a plant that wanted to travel deserved the door left open.