Colour botanical tattoo of a purple lily with a thin stem and buds running down the upper arm towards the elbow, in fine line style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Purple lily and stem on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A purple lily bloom with yellow stamens sits near the top of the stem, with a second partly open bud beside it and two more buds further down. The thin brown stem curves from the upper arm towards the elbow, drawn with fine linework and soft shading. The petals use layered violet and lilac tones on a bare skin background, with the bloom as the clear focal point.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hesper had been counting buds for three days when the lamp over Bay Nine began to flicker, and she did not look up from the trellis. The lily had come from a single bulb a cargo clerk smuggled aboard at the last port, wrapped in a wet sock. Nobody had told the ship's council. Nobody had needed to.

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The stem leaned toward the sodium strip the way every stem on board leaned, toward whatever light the ship allowed. Hesper pinched a dead leaf from the base and watched the second bud split along its seam, lilac first, then violet, the colour of the old dye vats on the lower decks where cloth was still woven by hand.

Her grandmother used to say lilies were the first flower ever listed on the manifest, a joke nobody laughed at any more. The bloom opened in the afternoon watch: six petals, a yellow fur of stamens catching the lamplight. Hesper thought about the clerks upstairs who would want it cut for the council table, and about the line in the logbook that called every living thing aboard a debt owed to the next crew.

She took her knife, cut the lowest bud instead, and set it in a jar of condenser water on the sill beside the lamp. Let the council count that. The flicker steadied, and the stem, bent and patient, turned its face to the light.

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