Two tattoo flash designs of a bold black swirled motif, the left version with pink lily-style flowers and green stems, the right version in solid black.

Swirled black motif with lily flowers, two versions

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

Two side-by-side versions of the same bold black motif, with two curling tops and a long tapering stem that loops at the base. The left version adds three pale pink, lily-like flowers with green buds, shaded lightly with soft pink and grey tones. The right version is solid black with no flowers, and both are drawn on a plain white background.

Botanical Lily Flower Swirl Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have the brush loaded before the chapel door has finished squeaking behind Mr Tully's boots. The board is ash, planed smooth by his own hands, and the widow wants a name on it by Saturday. Your father taught you the long stroke first: heavy at the top, where the pen presses hardest, then lifting and thinning until the line runs out like a tired rope. Say it to yourself as you work. Heavy, then light. Nobody in Coalbrook Row needs the lettering to shout.

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The name is Edwin Pryce, nineteen years at the Deep Level, and his mother has asked for lilies in the margin because lilies were what she grew against the wall of the terrace. You sketch them in pencil first, three heads nodding on a single stem. The stem is the hard part. It must loop back on itself at the foot, a closed eye, the way the rope coils round the winding wheel before the cage drops. You have drawn it so many times your wrist knows it without you.

Mrs Pryce watches from the doorway with her apron balled in both fists. She does not come in. When you finally turn the board to the light, she steps forward and touches the wet black with one knuckle, very gently, the way you would test bread. "He always wrote his name like that," she says. "All tails and no full stops." You tell her the loop is there so he has a way back, and she laughs, the first sound she has made in weeks.

That evening you rinse the brush in paraffin and hold the board up to the lamp one more time. The lilies are still tacky, the heavy stroke has dried glossy, and the loop at the foot has closed exactly where it began.