Colour and black ink tattoo of a dark scorpion climbing a green stem beneath an orange lily, with black swirling tendrils, on a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Scorpion and lily on the upper back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A dark scorpion with detailed segmented body and raised claws sits along a green stem that ends in an orange-pink lily with shaded petals and yellow centres. Black curling tendrils wrap around the scorpion's tail and claws and extend beneath it. The bold black linework contrasts with the soft shading of the flower and leaves against smooth skin.

Botanical Back Scorpion Lily Flower Stem Leaves Swirl Tendril

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pump in Bay Seven had been coughing for three days, and Nessa Varga spent the fourth morning on her knees beside it, a torch clamped in her teeth. Behind her the grow-racks hummed. Somewhere in the dark rows the mites were already at the beans, and she could hear Ruskin, the warden scorpion, ticking up the frame posts as he hunted. The colony had brought him up from the lower hab to eat pests and had never bothered to give him another name.

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The lily was the reason she came in early. It was the last bulb from the old seed vault, a thing nobody should have kept, and she had coaxed it through three failed cycles in a pot wedged between the nutrient tanks. Its petals were the colour of sunset seen through dust, darker at the throat where the yellow stamens stood up like struck matches. Each night Ruskin climbed the green stem and curled his tail around it, and each morning she told herself she would move the pot.

On the fourth morning the pump shrieked and the lights dropped to amber. Nessa found the fault in a cracked impeller, then turned to see the mites pouring up the racks in a grey tide toward the flower. Ruskin was already there. He had ignored the beans entirely. He stood over the pot with his claws raised and his tail hooked around the stem, and the mites broke against him like surf on rock while the lily, for the first time, opened fully in the low light.

She sat back on the cold floor with the spanner still in her hand. The colony would want the pot moved to a sealed cabinet, and the scorpion returned to the mite count, and she knew she would do neither. Some things grew because something dangerous had chosen to stand guard over them. She wiped the grease from her fingers and left him at his post.