Colour tattoo of a red lily with black and grey smoke-like swirls on the side of a person's ribs, in a realistic and Japanese-influenced style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red lily with smoke swirls on ribs

Japanese · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A realistic red lily with petals, stamens and soft shading sits at the centre of the design, surrounded by black and grey swirling forms that resemble smoke or cloud. The linework is soft and the shading moves smoothly from deep crimson to pale pink, with grey wash behind the flower. The tattoo wraps across the side of the torso on the ribs, against a blurred indoor background.

Japanese Realism Ribs Lily Flower Smoke Swirl Stamen Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The generator coughed twice before the big top lights came up, and Mr Halloran swore at it the way he swore at everything that season, quietly, with his eyes shut, as if the machine might take the hint and die on its own. I stood at the flap with the lily in both hands. Nell had grown it in a tin bath behind the horsebox, and it was the only thing on the lot that still looked like it expected an audience.

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Dmitri was already in the ring with his torches and his paraffin pot. Twelve people had paid at the gate, and I had counted them twice through the gap in the canvas: a pensioner in a brown cardigan, two boys passing a football between them, a mother holding a toddler up to see the hoops. Dmitri did not count them. He tipped his head back and breathed out, and a long ribbon of fire climbed into the rigging, then went grey and slow, curling over the lamps like something that had decided to stay for the second half.

The smoke gathered under the canvas and turned in lazy spirals, and I set the lily on the edge of the ring where the light could find its petals. Those crimson throats opened as the haze rolled across them, pink at the edges where the lamps caught them, and for a moment the whole tent looked less like a dying show and more like the inside of a cloud over a red sunset. The twelve stopped talking. Even the toddler went quiet.

When Dmitri finished, nobody clapped at first. Then the boys did, and the pensioner, and Mr Halloran at the back with his hat in his hands. We packed the wagons in October. I kept the lily, pressed flat in Nell's ledger, and when people ask why the paraffin never came out again, I tell them it was the only smoke worth making.