Neo-traditional tattoo of teal and magenta lily-style flowers with bold black outlines running down the side of a torso over the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Teal and magenta flowers down the ribs

Neo-trad · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A column of stylised flowers with bold black outlines climbs down the side of the torso, with the largest blooms at the lower end. The petals are filled with solid teal and magenta ink, with darker shading at the petal bases and small white highlights, and green leaves sit between the blooms. The composition is vertical and fills the frame, with a white top and blue fabric visible at the edges.

Neo-trad Ribs Flower Lily Floral Petal Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had been hauling bulbs up the harbour steps since the tide turned, sacks knocking against her hip, and the gulls had given up on her before the second flight. At the top, the terrace of cracked pots belonged to old Mr Pascoe, who had been dead eight months and had left her the lilies, a row of them climbing the wall behind the net loft like a ladder nobody had asked to climb.

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The lilies were not right. Everyone in Porthgwidden agreed on that. The stems came up the colour of bruised plums and the petals opened teal at the throat, so that by July the wall looked as if someone had knocked the regatta paint tins over. Pascoe had crossed them for thirty years, he'd told the chandler, from two bulbs his father brought home from a ship that never came back, and he had never once written the cross down.

She found his book in the drawer of the bait shed, under a tin of tar and a rosary nobody had claimed. The pages were ruled in columns: stem height, bloom count, date of first open. In the last column, in pencil gone silver, he had written the same word every year, enough. Nell read the columns backwards on the stone step with a mug of cocoa going cold, and when the light failed she lifted the biggest bulbs from the bottom of the wall.

She planted them along the sea wall where the spray reached, in a row facing the harbour mouth. By morning the first blooms had opened, teal and magenta, bright enough to be seen from the headland. The boats came in that August under a line of colour nobody had planted on purpose, and the harbour master, who had never once approved of anything on that wall, stood on the quay with his cap in his hand until the last of them tied up.