Enlarged with AI from a smaller original
Single line lily with curling stem
Botanical · Black and grey · Flash
A lily flower with a tall, curving stem and two slender leaves, drawn in flowing black outline. The petals are open and the stamens are shown as small, detailed black marks at the centre. The design is set against a plain white background with the stem sweeping down the lower half of the frame.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The lily came up in the wet ditch behind Pendle Cross the same week my father sold the bottom orchard, and nobody had planted it. Dad said a bird must have dropped the bulb, or the old cider man had, forty years back, and the thing had been waiting in the dark for someone to stop mowing.
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I was nineteen and furious about everything that August. The Bramley crop had come in heavy and the pickers from Hereford had gone home with their wages, and I spent the evenings on a ladder with a bucket, lifting windfalls that had gone soft and sweet and full of wasps. I did not want to be there. I wanted to be in a city where nobody knew what a rootstock was.
Then one dusk I found the lily bent over the ditch, its stem thin as fishing line, curling back on itself as if it was listening for something. The flower was open wide, the petals pulled back as though it had been shouted at, and its stamens stood up dark and fussy at the middle. I stood there with a windfall in each hand until the light went.
I came back with a jam jar of water and set it on the wall. Dad saw it and said nothing, which was how he said most things. By October the petals had gone, but the stem was still standing, bent towards the orchard. I left it there. The ladder can wait, I told him. He laughed and said the ladder always waits.
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