Close photo of fine line script reading 'like a lily' on the side of a foot, beside a brown leather flip-flop strap.

Script words 'like a lily' on a foot

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A close view of a foot wearing a brown leather flip-flop, with thin script lettering reading 'like a lily' running diagonally across the outer side of the foot. The linework is delicate and even, with no visible shading, and the ink is a dark blue-grey. The shallow focus leaves the toes and the lower edge of the frame softly blurred, which keeps attention on the lettering.

Fine line Lettering Other Script Lily Word Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Edmund will tell you the garden was never meant to be yours. You came up from the mill in February with mud to your shins, carrying the spade Sister Agnes left by the gate, and he watched you from the cloister arcade with his hands folded in his sleeves. He says nothing. He never says anything before Compline. Instead he sends the novice Thomas down with a slate, on which someone has scratched the words you have been trying to puzzle out for a week: consider the lilies.

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You do consider them. The bed under the south wall is black with rot from the wet spring, and the white lilies have sulked since the frost took their first shoots. You dig out the soft bulbs with a trowel, rinse them in the rain butt, and lay them on sacking to dry. Each one smells of wet earth with something sweeter underneath, like the inside of a church on a Sunday. Agnes once told you that a girl who works the soil should stand up straight, like a lily, and you laughed at her. You had thought the whole saying a joke about clothes and cloth. Now you wonder whether it was a promise.

On Lady Day the bed comes up green and then, all at once, white. You are kneeling there when Edmund finally comes down the steps, his habit caught on the rosemary. He stands over you a long time. Then he says, quite plainly, that he has been waiting for someone to ask why he keeps the bed when the infirmary wants the ground for beans. You open your mouth to answer and find he has already gone back inside, leaving you with the slate, the spade and one white bloom nodding by your knee.