Close-up of a botanical tattoo of a purple lily with black swirling vines on the top of a woman's foot, with red painted toenails.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Purple lily with swirls on the foot

Botanical · Other · Mixed · Photo

A purple lily with pointed petals and soft shading sits on the top of a foot, with thin black curling tendrils extending out to the left and right. The black linework is clean and the petals use lighter and darker purple tones to show depth. The photograph is taken at close range against a plain skin background, with the toes visible on the right.

Botanical Fine line Other Lily Flower Swirl Vine Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the wind off the moor finds every gap in this wall, and the gap I want you to mind is the one above the old postern. My grandmother's grandmother kept the keys to Harrowgate Keep when there was still a roof over the chapel. She told it that the lady of the house, Isobel Crane, had a lily garden inside the curtain wall, purple as a bruise at dusk, and she tended it herself because the gardeners would not go near the north tower.

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The lilies were not kind plants, she said. They climbed the stones and then they curled, reaching for anything warm, the way a child reaches for a sleeve. When the siege came in the hard winter, the household ate the last of the bread, and the lady gave her own rations to the cook's boy, who was sick with the flux. She sat up nights in the garden with a candle in a horn lantern, cutting the tendrils back so they would not choke the wall.

Come morning the garden was dead, every bloom gone grey, except one. It stood alone in the frost on the gatehouse side, its petals dark and shining, its vines spilling out through the arrow slit as though looking for the sky beyond the siege lines. The men on the hill saw it and lost heart, for a garden that would not die seemed to them a sign that the walls would not fall. They raised the siege at the thaw.

The lady died that spring, the story goes, and nobody cut that lily back again. Look now, past the rowan, where the stone has crumbled to a ledge. Yes, that is it, still climbing.