Pencil sketch of three lilies joined by curling vines, a design suited to a fine line or botanical tattoo.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three lilies with swirling vine design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of three lily-style flowers on thin, curling stems with spiral tendrils and tapering leaves. The linework is light and sketchy, with soft graphite shading on the petals and centres. The design is shown in black and grey on a plain white background, with the composition running diagonally from the top left to the lower right.

Botanical Fine line Lily Flower Vine Swirl Stem Leaf

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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 down, you, and mind the gull on that step. No, the other step. There. The Pell sisters, Marjorie and Ada, lived above the chandler's on Quay Street, and they kept a garden no bigger than a tablecloth, and that is where the lilies came from. Three bulbs, carried off a Lisbon ship in somebody's coat pocket, and nobody on the harbour gave them a chance in the salt air. They took anyway. Every June the stems came up thin as fishing line and curled over the wall as if they were looking for something to climb.

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Marjorie said the vine was counting. Each spiral was a year, and she tied a red thread round the tendril that opened the week her husband took the Brightwater out past the light and didn't bring her home. Ada never said what she tied hers to. She just pruned the yellowed leaves, slow and careful, the way you'd mend a net on a wet morning.

The winter the sea came over the breakwater, those three flowers were the only thing standing in that yard. Ada went down in her oilskin with a lantern, cutting tendrils free of the brickwork so they wouldn't drag the mortar out with them. When the tide dropped she found a boy from Chapel Lane curled under the vine, soaked through and too frightened to speak. Nobody had told him the lilies were there to be climbed, so he had simply held on.

Years after, that boy grew into a man with a boat of his own, and every June he came back to count the curls on that wall. He never found Ada's red thread, though he looked, and I have never told him it was tied to his name.