Black and grey shaded lily tattoo with swirling vine linework and a small script word on a shoulder blade, styled as botanical fine detail.

Shaded lily with swirls on a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded lily with five petals and visible stamens sits on the upper back over the shoulder blade, with black outlines and grey shading that gives the petals depth. Curling vine and scroll linework extends above and below the flower, and a short script word sits beneath it. The composition is centred on the flower with the swirls framing it across the shoulder.

Botanical Shoulder Lily Flower Swirl Vine Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

So you'll not be surprised that Old Isla Crane kept the lily wall the way she did, while the rest of the machair went to rack and ruin behind her. The lilies were never for sale. They came up in the wet June, pale at the root and shadowed at the tip, five petals to a bloom, and she would stand with her back to the wind and count the stamens the way a woman counts coins she does not quite trust.

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The bulbs had come from her husband, Tam Ferrier, who had fished the herring out of Stornoway for twenty years and come home one spring with a parcel of them wrapped in oilcloth from a Dutch skipper who owed him money. He trained the vines up the dyke stones and over the gate, curling them into swirls like the handwriting of a man who could never sit still, and above the gate he cut the name Eilidh into the lintel with a cold chisel, because that was their daughter and he said a gate ought to know who it belonged to.

The winter the Mhairi Rose failed to come back past the Sgeir, Isla kept on watering. Every morning she walked the wall with the can, and every morning the lilies stood there as if nothing had happened. Then in January, out of its season and against all sense, one bloom opened, grey as the sea under cloud. She cut it with the kitchen knife, wrapped the stem in a wet tea towel, and walked down to the slipway in the dark.

She laid it on the wet stone where the boats are hauled up. The tide was making, and it lifted the petals one at a time and carried them out past the pier light, turning slowly, until she could no longer tell them from the white crests. Some folk say she went home and planted the stem in the wall that very night. I have never been able to say whether she did.