Botanical tattoo of a pink lily with grey-shaded leaves and black swirling tendrils across the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pink lily with swirls on upper back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large pink lily with a bold red-pink bloom sits on the upper back, with its stamens and curled petals clearly defined. Grey and black shading gives the dark leaves and petal edges depth, while black swirling tendrils with small dots extend to the left and right of the flower. The composition is centred on the bloom, with the swirls framing it across the skin.

Botanical Back Lily Flower Leaves Swirl Dot Tendril

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the kettle, it's still spitting, and don't you dare touch that pan until I've finished with the onions. Right. Where was I? Ah, the lily. Cook on the Marguerite Vance, Hobb Tennant, had a bulb of it in his sea chest, wrapped in a sock from Rotterdam, and swore the thing had been grown in a glasshouse for a duke who'd since hanged himself for debt. Nobody believed him. The bulb went rotten on the Biscay crossing, so he claimed, and then sprouted in the damp of the hold anyway, pushing a green spike up through the bilge grating like it had somewhere to be.

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By the time we raised the Azores the stem was as tall as the galley door and the bloom had opened, pink as boiled prawns, with its stamens standing out like the bent wires of a broken umbrella. Hobb would not let the cabin boy near it. He kept it in a biscuit tin with the lid off, watered it from the slop bucket, and talked to it when the wind was up. The first mate called it mutiny in a pot. The captain, who had a weakness for anything that refused to die, said nothing at all.

Then came the squall off the Horn, the one that took the foremast and two of the Dutchmen. Hobb was thrown against the range and cracked a rib, and when we pulled him out of the scuppers he was clutching the tin with both arms. The lily had come through without a bruise. Its petals had curled back on themselves in the shape of a question mark, the way a swirl curls when the ink runs out of the pen.

He never grew another one. He said a flower like that only comes once to a ship, and you feed it or you let it go. I still have the tin. Pass me the salt, and mind your fingers on the lid.