Sepia-toned shaded drawing of a fleur-de-lis with raised, highlighted edges on a tan background, shown as a tattoo design rather than on skin.

Shaded fleur-de-lis design

Black and grey · Flash

A single fleur-de-lis is drawn centrally, with a tall pointed centre petal, two curled side petals and a band across the middle. The form is rendered with soft brown shading along the edges and white highlights, giving it a raised, embossed look. The palette is limited to cream and brown tones on a warm tan background, and the motif fills most of the frame.

Fleur-de-lis

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stonemason's boy had been told never to touch the carved lilies above the chapel door, so naturally he was the one who found the loose key tucked behind the third of them. Brother Anselm had gone grey climbing the scaffold that autumn, and the whole village said the wind off the marsh had got into his lungs. Nobody asked the boy anything. He pocketed the key and went down through the ruined nave in the dusk, where the nettles stood higher than the broken pews and the crows argued in the rafters.

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The door at the bottom of the crypt stairs was iron, pitted like old bread, and the key turned with a sound like a cough. Inside, a single candle stub sat on a ledge, its wax gone yellow with age, and beside it lay a bundle of letters tied in red thread. The top one was addressed in a careful, slanting hand to a woman in Rouen. The boy could read only his own name and the word for mercy, but the seal pressed into the wax was plain enough: three petals rising from a band, the centre one tall as a spear, the two side curls turning inward like the ends of a ribbon.

He carried the letters up into the cold air and found Anselm's ledger open on the altar step, the last page still wet with ink. The entry read only: the lilies are not ours to keep, return them when the bell stops. The bell had not rung in forty years. The boy sat with the packet on his knees until the stars came out over the marsh, then he climbed the scaffold, slipped the key back behind the carved stone, and left the letters sealed.