Purple shaded lily tattoo with black ornamental swirls and dots on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Purple lily with swirls on upper back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large purple lily sits at the centre of the design, with its petals shaded in several tones of violet to give volume. Fine black scrollwork and small dots trail out from the flower across the skin, with a few swirls ending in pink-tinted accents. The design is framed against the back of a person's shoulder, with the lily as the main focal point.

Botanical Neo-trad Back Lily Flower Swirl Scrollwork Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dad said the lily would never take in the salt air at Gullhaven, so when Mrs Ridley pressed a bulb into my hand the week before the herring boats went out, I planted it in a biscuit tin on the sill of our net loft and didn't tell him. It came up purple in March, the colour of the bruise on a mackerel's flank, and by May it was leaning out of the tin as if it wanted the harbour.

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The swirls started the summer I was fourteen, when the wind off the bay got into everything. Each morning I found curls of black thread caught on the window latch, fine as the twine Dad used for mending nets, and dots of salt on the leaves as though someone had flicked a brush over them. I swept them into a jam jar. Dad called it my magpie hoard and never once asked what I was keeping.

The year the Marigold went down off the point, Mrs Ridley came up the steps with her hat in her hands and asked whether the lily still bloomed. I said it did. She asked me to bring a flower to the quay, so I cut the one stem that had opened early and carried it down past the drying racks, the scrollwork from the jar trailing behind me in the wind.

Dad was on the slipway with the other men. He took the lily without a word, then tucked the pink-tipped petal into his cap band, where it stayed until the tide came back in.