Black and grey realistic lily tattoo with curling vine linework across the side of a person's ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three lilies with curling vines on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

Three lily blooms with shaded petals and visible stamens are arranged diagonally down the side of the ribcage, joined by thin curling vine lines. The petals use soft grey shading with darker creases, giving the flowers a realistic, dimensional look. The plain skin around the design and the blue top at the upper edge keep the focus on the tattoo.

Botanical Realism Ribs Lily Flower Vine Tendril Stamen Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, for the cut's cold after dark and I'm not telling this twice. Ada Lusk brought three lily bulbs up from Brentford in a jam jar the spring the Mary Ann was laid up with a cracked strake. She wasn't a woman for flowers. She had eleven children and a husband who drank his wages at the Navigation, so the bulbs went in the mud beside lock twelve, because it was the only soil nobody else wanted.

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That summer the vines came up after them, thin as cotton thread, curling round every bit of iron they could find. They wound the paddle gear and the bollard and the chain on the bottom gate. Old Tom at the lock said they were a nuisance and would have them off with a billhook, but every time he raised the blade a bloom opened in the reeds and he lost his nerve. Three flowers, grey as dishwater in the moonlight, creased dark like a glove left out in the rain, and they smelt of something you'd never find on the towpath.

Then came the November flood, the water rising brown over the weir until the gate chains sang. Tom was up on the beam with a lantern, certain the gate would go and take the Mary Ann with it. The vines had their hold on the links so tight that when the timber groaned they creaked and held, all the way through the night, until the water sank back between its banks.

In the morning Ada came down with a bucket of tea and found three new blooms open on the bank, their stamens dusted gold where the frost hadn't yet touched. She poured Tom a cup and said nothing, and the vine kept on climbing. Mind your feet on the gunwale now. It's still holding.