Colour tattoo of two red lilies with green leaves and black swirling vine linework on the side of the ribs.

Red lilies and swirling vine on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

Two red lily flowers with orange throats rise along a stem with dark green leaves, finished with bold black scrolling vine linework. The flowers use smooth colour shading with darker red edges and highlights, while the leaves and swirls are solid black or dark green. The design runs vertically down the side of the torso, with the lower flourish curling towards the hip.

Botanical Ribs Lily Flower Leaves Stem Vine Swirl Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mabel Quayle had carried the lily bulbs in a biscuit tin on the 7.40 from Lewes, and by the time the train reached Haywards Heath the tin had gone soft at one corner with damp. Her father would have scolded her for the mess, but he had been dead since Lent, and the bulbs were all she had left of his nursery. She set the tin on the bench under the iron canopy and watched the porter, a boy called Dennis Pym, sweep cinders off the platform as if they had personally insulted him.

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The bulbs were a red Cape variety her father had crossed in a glasshouse behind the signal box, petals the colour of a pillar box with throats the yellow of a hen's yolk. Nobody else in Sussex grew them. The show committee at Brighton had refused them twice on the grounds that no lily could be that red. Mabel meant to prove them wrong by Saturday, and she had a drawing of the vine her father had planned to train up the glasshouse wall, black ink curling like the ironwork scrolls above her head.

The 8.15 was late. Dennis came back with a cup of tea and an opinion about the timetable, and while he talked she unwrapped the top bulb and found it had sprouted a pale green shoot during the journey, as if it had heard the whistle and wanted to be going somewhere too. She laughed, and he looked at her oddly, and she realised she had not laughed since the funeral.

When the train came in she kept the tin on the seat beside her and did not get up to meet the crowd. Instead she unfolded the drawing across her knee and began to lay the scrolls out over the grey platform in her head, the way her father had taught her, starting at the root and letting the vine find its own way up. The lilies would go in at the top. The shoot would go in at the bottom. It was, she decided, the only sensible place to begin.