Fine line black script tattoo reading still i rise, with a shaded flower and leaves at the end of a thin stem, on a patch of skin.

Still I rise script with a flower

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo spells the words still i rise in thin, flowing script, with the stem of a plant running through the letters. A small shaded flower with two leaves sits at the right-hand end, and one more leaf hangs beneath the word i. The linework is crisp and the lettering is mostly solid black, with soft grey and muted purple shading in the petals and leaves against pale skin.

Fine line Lettering Botanical Other Script Lettering Quote Flower Leaves Stem

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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

Sit closer, the wind off the moor takes half of what I say. No, leave the lamp where it is, the old ones like a bit of light on the stones. The keep at Cold Hollin was burned the winter the bells were melted down, and the lord's daughter Maud was left in the east tower with a tinderbox and a psalter she could not read.

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Every morning she climbed the broken stair to the window and watched the village masons carry stone out of the courtyard, cart by cart. Nobody came up to fetch her. By the second spring a seed had lodged in the flagstones beneath the words the first lord had cut over the gate, and a thin green stem pushed up through the mortar and wound itself through the letters, the way a wick runs through a candle.

The children said the plant was cursed and would bring down what was left of the wall. Maud pinched off its leaves whenever the bailiff rode past, and each time it put out two more. In the autumn a single bloom opened at the end of the stem, dark at the throat and pale at the petals, and the bailiff's men stood in the gateway arguing over whether to pull it up.

They never did. The frost split the masonry that winter, and in the thaw the flower was still there, bent and muddy but standing, one leaf hanging low beneath the word like a hand holding it up. Maud came down the stair at last with a clay pot and a coil of rope. Mind the third step, it gives way. That is all I know, though the stem is still climbing up there, if you care to look.