Colour realism tattoo of purple lilies with pink buds and green leaves on the upper arm.

Realistic lily tattoo on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A large colour tattoo of an open lily with stamens and two closed buds, with leaves in green behind them. The petals are shaded in purple, magenta and lilac, with soft highlights and dark recesses that give the flowers volume. The design fills the frame diagonally across the skin, with a dark background around the arm.

Realism Botanical Upper arm Lily Flower Bud Petal Stamen Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the fire's behind you and it won't reach the both of us. Brother Anselm kept the lily bed below the east wall, and every spring he swore the flowers knew when a bell was about to ring. He'd stand at the rail with his sleeves pushed up and watch the buds shoulder their way out of the green.

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That year the abbot wanted the bed dug for beans, because beans could feed forty men and a lily feeds nobody. Anselm said nothing. He went down after compline with a dark lantern and a spade, and he lifted the bulbs one by one, wrapping each in wet moss and hiding them in the lee of the chapel where the frost never reached. Among them was the tallest and proudest, a bulb the colour of plums, its stamens heavy with pollen like a soldier's gold.

In the morning the abbot found the bed bare and the beans nowhere to be seen. He was a patient man. He waited until the lilies came up again the following June, purple and magenta, the closed buds hanging over the leaves like fists. He bent to smell them, and the pollen came away yellow on his thumb, and he stood a long while with his hand held out in front of him as if he had been handed something he had not asked for.

Anselm never told him where the beans had gone, and the abbot never asked again. Down in the lower field they came up crooked and sweet. Every evening after vespers the old man walked past them without looking, straight to the wall where the lilies stood, and touched one bud with his thumb as he went by.