Colour tattoo of a purple and orange lily with green leaves on the upper back near the shoulder, in a soft painterly botanical style.

Purple lily on the upper back

Botanical · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A large lily bloom with blue-violet petals, an orange-red centre and yellow-tipped stamens sits on the upper back near the shoulder blade. Black linework defines the petal edges and the dark green leaves beneath, while soft blended shading and small dark speckles give the flower depth. Purple, orange and green ink fill the composition against a faint pinkish wash of background shading.

Botanical Shoulder Lily Flower Petal Leaves Stamen Water droplet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The net came up heavy off Skerrow Ness at first light, and Davie Moir swore before he saw what was tangled in it. It was not weed or a drowned gannet but a lily, its petals still violet at the edges and its throat burnt orange as a coal, wound through the mesh as if someone had threaded it there. Seawater ran off the stamens in beads. The crew stopped hauling. Nobody aboard the Girl Jean had ever brought up a flower.

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Skipper Ivy Carr took it in her gloved hands and turned it to the grey light. Everyone on the quay knew the cottage at the end of the breakwater, where Ruth Halloran grew lilies along the wall because her husband had carried the bulbs home from Shetland before the war. Frank had been gone four winters now. Ruth still walked down to the rocks each June with a paper twist of something in her coat pocket, and the men pretended not to watch her.

They ran the boat round to the cottage steps on the top of the tide. Ruth was already waiting, a shawl pulled tight, and when she saw what Ivy held she did not reach for it straight away. Then she said that she had thrown a bulb off the Ness every June since the funeral, and had never once thought the sea would send one back. She cupped the flower carefully, the way you would take a sleeping bird, and a single drop slid from a petal onto her wrist.