Colour tattoo of three purple lilies with black scrolling vines on the side of a ribcage, in a botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Purple lilies and black swirls on ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows three lily flowers in shaded purple with pale highlights and orange-tinted stamens, set against black scrolling vines with curled tendrils. The lilies are rendered with smooth shading and soft gradients, while the black swirls have bold, flowing linework. The design runs diagonally up the side of the torso, with the flowers grouped towards the lower half and the vine rising toward the upper edge of the frame.

Botanical Ribs Lily Flower Vine Swirl Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you lot, and mind the candle, for the wax drips when I come to the gate. Brother Hilary planted the lilies the spring the flood took the old wall. He had three bulbs from a carter who would not say where he got them, and they came up the colour of a bruise at dusk, which no white lily ever is.

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Hilary was no gardener. He was a copyist, his fingers worn from ink, so he let the vine go where it pleased. It crept up the cloister wall and out across the gravel, black as the iron of the postern gate, curling into scrolls the way a bracken frond unrolls, tighter at each tip. Prior Osric called it a sin to let a thing grow without a rule. Hilary replied that his rule was written on the vellum before him, and the vellum said nothing whatever about lilies.

On the feast of Saint Brendan the flowers opened in the night, all three together, and the bell-ringer swore he heard them tick like cooling metal. By morning the black tendrils had climbed the postern and wound the bolt so tight that no key in the house would turn it. Hilary sat on the step with his inkpot and laughed until he wept, because at last he understood what the carter had meant. The lilies were not for growing. They were for keeping things in.

Hilary's fingers stayed purple at the nails until the day he died, and that is why, when novices ask me to show them the gate, I keep my own hands tucked up my sleeves.