Red lily tattoo with black linework and swirling vine on the inner ankle and top of a foot, shaded in soft red tones.

Red lily with vine on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Colour · Photo

A red lily with six pointed petals sits on the ankle and top of the foot, with a central stamen dotted in black and a black vine curling up the leg and down toward the toes. The petals are outlined in black and shaded with red and pink gradients to give them a slightly raised, dimensional look. The tattoo is centred on a foot resting on a pale cream sheet, with painted red toenails visible.

Fine line Botanical Ankle Lily Flower Vine Swirl Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

They met again in the old schoolhouse at Tallow Hill, thirty years after the last bell, and nobody could agree on who had planted the lily by the back gate. Mrs Peebles said it was Harriet Dunn, who had cried when the frost took the first one. Harriet said it was the caretaker's boy. The caretaker's boy, now a grey man with a van, said it had come up on its own, climbing the railings like something that wanted out.

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The old folk of the valley had a saying: a lily that climbs is a lily that remembers where it was rooted. They brought a cutting to the reunion in a jam jar, wrapped in a wet tea towel, and set it on the piano. By supper the vine had wound round the neck of the jar and down the leg of the piano, curling toward the floorboards as if it was looking for the path it had lost.

Harriet put her hand on the stem and felt it warm, though the hall was cold. She said she had been the one who buried the first bulb under the gate, the night before the school was shut, because her mother had told her a flower keeps whatever is put in its roots. Nobody laughed. A few of them went quiet and studied their own hands.

Before the lights went out they carried the jar back down the lane and planted it where the railings had been taken away. In the morning six red petals had opened, and a thin black vine ran from the roots down the bank toward the river, as if the old school had sent its one good thread after them.