Colour tattoo of purple lilies with a black-line vine and leaves running down a person's back, in a botanical style.

Purple lilies and vine down the back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

Two purple lily flowers with shaded petals and yellow-orange stamens sit high on the back, with a long stem, leaves and curling tendrils descending towards the waist. The shading uses light and dark violet with black linework and grey tones on the leaves and stems. The subject is framed against a plain black background, with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Botanical Back Lily Flower Vine Stem Leaf Bud Swirl Tendril

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have the crate open on the steel table at Dover before the lorry driver has finished his tea, and the smell reaches you first: wet soil and something sweeter underneath, like cut stems left too long in a vase. Inside, packed in damp sphagnum, are two hundred bulbs wrapped in brown paper, each the size of a fist and pale as an onion. The manifest says tulips. Your gloves are blue. You turn one over and find its papery skin already splitting at the crown, a green tip pushing up like a question.

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The driver leans in the doorway and says tulips don't look like that. He is not angry, only tired, and he wants his ferry. You tell him that is exactly what you are trying to decide. Your supervisor has a rule about plant material from outside the Union: anything with a root gets photographed, logged, and either sealed or sent back. You have the camera. You have the log. What you do not have is a category for a bulb that someone has wrapped twice, once in paper and once in a square of cotton printed with a faded vine.

You photograph the cotton instead. Then you write LILIUM on the form in capitals, because that is what the bulbs are, and because your grandmother grew them along the fence of a house you no longer own. You stamp the sheet. The driver signs without reading. The seal goes on, the tag goes on, and the grey pallet rolls away into the yard. Before you close the crate you tuck one bulb back into its cotton and set it on the shelf above the scanner, where it will sit for a week, unclaimed, sending its single pale shoot toward the strip light.