Healed colour tattoo of three red lilies with black swirling vine and outline stars, running across the top of a bare foot towards the ankle.

Red lilies and stars across a foot

Botanical · Other · Mixed · Photo

Three red lilies with white highlights and soft purple shading form the main cluster, joined by a black swirling vine and accented by outlined stars. The lines are clean and dark, while the petals are shaded with smooth gradients of red and pink. The design spreads diagonally from the toes towards the ankle, with the stars trailing off to the left and the vine curling up near the ankle bone.

Botanical Other Lily Flower Star Vine Swirl Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the yellow line, you lot, the eight-fifteen is never late for a story. Now, the stationmaster at Carrow Junction had a daughter called Ada, and she was the sort who counted things. She counted the sleepers from the platform to the water tower, three hundred and twelve of them, and she counted the lamps. When the wind came off the moor in October she counted stars through the signal gantry, because she'd been told the smoke had swallowed every one over the cutting.

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One night she walked the embankment with a lantern and found, growing between the rails where nobody had planted anything, three lilies, red as signal lamps, their throats striped white as though someone had lit them from inside. A black vine ran along the ballast and curled up the bank like a question mark. Where it ended, small five-pointed stars had been pressed into the gravel, outlined and empty, as if some careful hand had been practising its stars on the ground.

She knelt and picked none of them. Her father always said a flower plucked by a railwayman's child would stop the next train dead on the track, and Ada believed him. So she sat down on the sleepers and waited. The lilies leaned toward the lantern, and the stars she had counted all summer came down one by one and settled on the gravel beside her boots.

By morning the signal had turned green for the first time in a year, and the lilies were gone. The stationmaster swore the stars were still there, pressed into the cinders at the Carrow end, and if you walk down there tonight you can count them yourselves. Five points each. Right, that's your train. Mind the gap.