Realistic colour tattoo of two red lilies with green leaves across a woman's upper back and shoulder blade.

Red lilies across a shoulder blade

Realism · Back · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows two large red lilies with orange throats, one higher on the shoulder and one lower on the back, with thin dark stamens and petals. The shading is smooth and detailed, with soft gradients from deep maroon to bright orange. Soft green wash sits behind the flowers, and the composition follows the curve of the shoulder blade against a black lace garment.

Realism Botanical Back Shoulder Lily Flower Petal Leaves Stamen

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The third hard frost took my seedlings in March, so Father sold the glasshouse to the Harrisons' boy and I kept only the bulbs, wrapped in sacking in the cold frame behind the chapel wall. Nobody in Ashdown thought a girl could raise a lily fit for the Lewes show. I had three seasons of failures in a biscuit tin under my bed, each one labelled in pencil with the date it had died.

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The one that worked came from a bulb I bought off a sailor for two shillings, its skin papery and grey as a moth. It flowered in the second week of July in a red so deep it looked wet, the petals curled back like the arms of someone stretching after sleep. Inside each throat was a bruise of orange, freckled with dark pollen. I cut it at dawn before the bees were up and carried it down the lane in a bucket of rainwater, the leaves brushing my knees the whole way.

Mr Corbett, the judge, held it to the window for a long time without speaking. Then he said lilies had no business being that colour and offered me ten pounds for the bulb. I said it was not for sale. He pressed the stem between his fingers, checking for rot, and left a green smudge on my cuff that would not wash out, and he walked off to the marquee with his hands in his pockets as if he had already won.

That night I pressed one petal flat inside the ledger where I kept my accounts. By morning the orange had bled through to the next page in a perfect ring, and the stamens had left a scatter of rust-coloured dots beside the column marked sales. I looked at them for a while, then drew a line through the figure of ten pounds and wrote, underneath, not yet.