Black and grey shaded lily tattoo with curling tendrils and a small sun motif on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Shaded lily with swirls on upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a large lily in bloom with two buds and leaves, with a small sunburst motif below the flower. The petals are rendered with soft grey shading and fine dark outlines, giving them a three-dimensional look. Thin black swirling lines curl out from both sides of the flower and frame the composition on the upper back.

Botanical Realism Back Lily Flower Bud Leaves Swirl Sun

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The crates had been stencilled in Yokohama with a little rayed sun, and by the time we raised the Cape the paint had bled into the wood like weak tea. Mr Okamura had packed each bulb in damp moss and wrapped it in oiled paper, and he made me swear on my mother's name that nobody would open the hold before Liverpool. I was nineteen and a ship's clerk, which meant I checked the manifest every morning and got blamed whenever a crate went soft.

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Off Madeira the lilies began to smell. Not rot, quite, but something green and sweet that crept up the ladder and into the saloon, where the stewards grumbled about it over their porridge. On the fortieth night I took a lantern down with a knife and found the bulb in the third crate already sending out a pale shoot, curled tight as a fist, with two buds swelling beside it as if they were arguing over who should go first. I should have reported it. Instead I sat on a coil of rope and watched the lamp swing, and the shadows of the shoot wheeled round the bulkhead in long loops, like ink on a page not yet dry.

We docked at the Mersey in a drizzle that turned every shed roof to slate. The lily had not bloomed, and I knew I would be told to write it off. But when the crate was swung onto the quay, the lead bud had split a crack, and inside was a tongue of white so fine it looked stitched. I packed the bulb back into its moss and kept the sun stencil for myself. On the ferry home I held the tin on my knee, and the smell of it stayed in my coat for a week, green and sweet, like the first morning of something.