Black and grey shaded lily tattoo with curling stem details on the lower abdomen, beside a navel piercing.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Shaded lily on the lower abdomen

Botanical · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded lily flower with a curled stem and a single swirling tendril sits on the lower abdomen. The petals are rendered in soft grey gradients with dark outlines, and the stamens are picked out in fine lines at the centre. The plain skin background keeps the tattoo as the clear focus of the framing.

Botanical Other Lily Flower Stem Tendril Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Ferrars left owing four weeks and a pewter candlestick, and I could have forgiven both. What kept me up was the drawing Mr Ferrar left pinned under the hall clock. It was a lily, shaded in pencil so soft the paper seemed to breathe, its petals curling back like wet linen and a single tendril slipping off the stem like a thought he had not finished.

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I took it to the back kitchen the morning the gulls got into the bins and laid it beside the ledger. My husband Tom used to say I could not look at a flower without wanting to count its petals. Six, I counted, three upright and three falling away, with the stamens drawn in hair-fine strokes that caught the light from the window. I shaded the lower petal twice, pressing harder at the edge where it folded over, and the rest of the morning went on without me.

Nell Ferrar came round on the Saturday with her brother's address scrawled on a beer mat and a box of needles wrapped in a tea towel. She had a steady hand and a habit of humming hymns through her teeth, and she did not ask why I wanted a lily that would never survive the wind off the harbour. She only said that some people keep their dead in photographs and some keep them in ink, and that ink lasts longer than sea air.

When she had finished the drawing she turned it to the window and tilted her head, and said it now looked as if it might open if you breathed on it. I paid her in cash and two jars of damson jam, and I hung the sketch above the ledger where the Ferrars' bill used to be. It is still there. The candlestick sits on the mantelpiece, and the tide has never once come in as far as the lily.