Colour tattoo of a pink lily with purple shading, white stars and black swirls on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pink lily with stars on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A pink lily with soft shading and pale highlights forms the centre of the design, with small white stars and black linework swirls spreading out around it. Purple wash sits behind the flower and stars, and a black curled flourish extends below the bloom. The tattoo fills most of the frame, photographed from the side against a grey sleeve and a textured pale wall.

Botanical Upper arm Lily Flower Star Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cage stuck at four hundred feet on the Tuesday, and by dinnertime half of Hollin Row was standing at the pit gates with flasks nobody had asked for. My mother handed me the tea urn and told me to make myself useful, which meant walking the length of the fence twice and counting men who weren't there.

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Mrs Ruddock from number nine kept a pink lily in a tin bath on her back step. She said stargazers were for funerals and she would have none of them, so she grew the pink sort that came up brazen in July and opened like a fist. When I took her flask back she pressed a bloom into my hand, still cold from the night, and said the pit had taken plenty of men but never once a flower.

Dad came up at half past six, grey as the slag heap, with his lamp still lit out of habit. The first thing he said was that Tommy Pell had been singing under the rubble to keep the others awake, and that he had stopped singing when he heard the rescue picks. The second thing he said was to ask whether the flask had sugar in it.

Afterwards I laid the lily inside the Bible at the page with the list of births. Above the lamp-room door the men had chalked a small star beside every name that came back up that week. I counted them on the way home. There were eleven, and one had a curl drawn under it that looked, in the dusk, like a wisp of smoke rising off the wheel.