Purple and pink watercolour-style flower tattoo with soft blended edges on a person's upper back and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Purple watercolour flowers on a shoulder blade

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A woman's upper back shows a tattoo of several large flowers in purple, pink and blue-grey, with a long thin stem running down towards the shoulder blade. The linework is soft and mostly absent, with the petals built from layered washes of colour and gentle shading that fade at the edges. The flowers are grouped off-centre against a blurred warm-toned background, and a fine gold chain is visible at the top left.

Botanical Back Shoulder Flower Petal Stem Lily

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, love, you'll not stand on that deck all night with the cold coming up through your boots. Mind the coal bucket. My mother had a story about the lilies below Tench Lock, and she told it the way she poured tea, slowly, so you'd not scald yourself on the bit that mattered.

Keep reading

There was a painter once who lived aboard the Marigold, moored where the willows lean over the cut. He had a pot of violet, a pot of rose, and a brush worn down to three hairs, and every morning he painted the water until it looked breathed on. One dry August he ran out of paper and painted onto his own shirt cuff instead. The cloth went blue, then mauve, then the colour a bruise goes as it heals. He rinsed the brush in the cut that night, and that's where the lilies came from that autumn, up through the silt.

They grew tall, with stems as thin as sewing cotton, reaching down through the brown water as if hunting for the bottom of a picture. The lock-keeper's boy tried to pull one up and found the stem went on past the weed, past the old pram wheel, further than any flower has a right to go. He let go quick. The petals spread open on the surface like someone had dropped a letter and the ink had run.

The painter never sold another picture. He sat on the towpath each evening with his sleeve pushed up, and when the last bloom folded shut he'd say, there, that's the colour finished, and go below to sleep. So if you ever see one out on the water, don't you go reaching for it. It's only borrowing the light off the river, and it'll give it back when it's done.