Colour realism tattoo of red lilies and a blue butterfly on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red lilies and blue butterfly on a shoulder

Realism · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

Three red lilies with dark stamens and shaded petals sit on the upper back, with a blue butterfly with pale spotted edges resting beside them. A soft yellow and grey wash sits behind the flowers, and a thin dark line curves beneath them. The photo is taken from behind and shows the shoulder and a fine chain necklace at the top of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Thorne Carrow planted lilies after the flood, because the lilies that had grown along the Wyke wall were red, and red was the colour the river had been the summer the bridge went. So when Ada Pell came up the lane in March with a trowel and three bare bulbs wrapped in wet newspaper, the women at the pump set down their buckets to watch.

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She planted them against the south wall of the chapel, where the sun got in early, and by June they stood higher than the gatepost, three heads nodding over the graves. Her brother Tom had drowned in the Wyke with his boots still on. Ada did not speak of him to anyone, but every evening she stood among the lilies with the stamens brushing her wrists while the yellow light went grey over the water meadows.

In the last week of July a blue butterfly came out of the hedge and settled on the topmost bloom. It was too big for the valley and too blue for anything that lived there, and white dust lay along its wings like frost on a window. It stayed the whole night. In the morning Ada found a thin dark thread tied from the lily stem to a nail in the chapel wall, curving down in a loop like a question mark, and she knew then that Tom had sent word the only way the drowned can.

She untied the thread, folded it into her palm, and walked down to the Wyke to tell him she had heard.

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