Coloured drawing of a purple iris with yellow markings and green leaves, outlined in black on white paper, in a traditional botanical flash style.

Purple iris flower design

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A purple iris flower is drawn in coloured pencil with a bold black outline, with three large petals, a central upright petal and a smaller lower petal. The petals shade from violet at the edges to yellow near the centre, with fine darker veins. Three green leaves sit at the left of the bloom on a plain white background.

Traditional Botanical Iris Flower Leaves Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mairi carried the bulbs up the tower in her apron pocket, one for every step her mother had said a girl with wet boots could not climb. The wind came off the grey water that spring like gravel thrown at the glass, and the lamp had to be trimmed every dusk or the whole coast of Harrow Skerry would go dark.

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Her father said irises were flowers for graves and churchyards, not for a rock with nothing on it but gulls. She planted them anyway, in a cracked kettle at the foot of the wall where the spray could reach. They came up in May, violet at the lip and gold at the throat, and the fishermen who rowed past said the island had finally grown something worth looking at.

In October the fog came in thick as wool. Three boats were out after the herring and the keeper could not see his own hand on the rail. The supply boat had been turned back, the oil was running low, and Mairi went up the stairs in the dark with the last tin of paraffin under her arm, climbing slowly so she would not spill a drop.

She did not need to be clever. She only needed the light to stay steady until the boats found the gap in the rocks. By morning the lamp had burned through the night and the fog had lifted off the water like a sheet. Down at the wall the kettle stood with its blooms gone over and its leaves torn by the wind, and her father carried it indoors without a word and set it on the sill facing the sea.