Colour tattoo of a red lily with black swirling vines and grey shading on the ribs of a person wearing a green top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red lily and swirling vines on the side

Realism · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A realistic red lily with shaded petals and a dark centre sits on the side of the torso, with fine black vine swirls curling around it. Grey shading behind the flower suggests a soft background or sweep of light. Warm red and brown ink dominates the flower, with black linework and grey tones providing contrast.

Realism Botanical Ribs Lily Flower Vine Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lily came up in the wrong place, on the scree below the chapel wall, where nothing else would take. Tom Ashdown found it in March, a single red spike with no leaves, and carried the bulb home in his coat pocket because he could not bear to leave it for the goats. His mother put it in a chipped jug on the windowsill and told him it would be dead by Whitsun. It was not dead.

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By midsummer the stem had thickened and split into six orange-red petals, dark at the throat, and black runners had started to climb out of the jug and across the sill. They curled over the edge of the table and round the salt cellar like the tendrils of a hop. Mrs Pell from the end cottage, who kept bees and trusted nothing that did not hum, said the vines were looking for something to hold. The vicar's wife said it was bindweed and should go on the bonfire.

Tom did not burn it. He took it up the lane on a wet evening in August and dug a hole in the stony ground under the chapel wall. The sky over the estuary was the colour of pewter, and a grey sweep of rain lay across the marsh like a cloth being drawn off a table. He pressed the bulb into the gravel, and the vines came with him, unrolling from his sleeve and feeling along the stones until they found the wall and took hold.

Nobody saw it flower again, though some swore they could smell it on the lane all through the winter. By spring the wall was green with runners, and a red bloom stood on the scree where no bloom should be. Tom went up with a pail for the bees and found he had nothing left to carry. He sat on the wall and let the vines do the holding.