Small red fleur-de-lis tattoo with dark shading on the back of a person's neck, with a hand holding up their hair.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red fleur-de-lis on the back of the neck

Neck · Mixed · Photo

A small fleur-de-lis sits centred on the back of a person's neck, filled in red with darker grey-black shading along its edges and lower stem. The view is from behind, showing a hand holding back dark hair, dangling ornate earrings and a black top. The tattoo is the clear focal point against the soft, natural skin tones.

Neck Fleur-de-lis Neck Earring Hair Hand

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The paint on the bow is still tacky when the rain starts, and you are the only one on the Lys Rouge who thinks to drag the tarpaulin forward before anyone else wakes. Odile watches from the wheelhouse door in her husband's coat. She has never liked the lily. Gaston cut the stencil from a playing card the week they married, and for forty years it has been the only thing on the barge that wasn't grey, rust or diesel black.

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You mix the red yourself, in a jam jar, with a spoon of lamp black to deepen the edges where the varnish has worn thin. Odile said the lily should look burned into the wood, not sat on top of it. So you go over each petal twice, once in clean red and once with the shadow pulled down the lower stem, until the figure looks less like a sign and more like something left behind by a fire that went out politely.

The lock at Varenne takes two hours to fill. You stand on the coping with the rope in your hands while the gates groan and the water climbs the slimed brick, and Odile tells you again about the winter the canal froze and Gaston walked the whole length of it on the ice to fetch a pump.

At the far gate a girl on a bicycle stops to watch the barge rise. She reaches out as the bow comes level with the towpath and touches the lily with one finger. When she lifts it away there is a faint red mark on her fingertip, and she looks at it, then at you, and you say nothing. The river carries the boat on, and the paint stays wet a little longer than it should.