Colour realism tattoo of a water lily, lily pads and a koi fish with ripples, placed across a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Water lily and koi on upper back

Realism · Back · Colour · Photo

A large water lily with pale yellow and cream petals and a pink centre rises above green lily pads on the left and right. Below the flower, a koi fish with orange and white markings swims among grey pebbles, with concentric ripples spreading outwards. The shading is soft and smooth, with gradual tonal transitions across the petals, pads and water, and the design fills the upper back with the flower as the focal point.

Realism Botanical Back Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pond at Hollin Farm was dug by a man who disliked frogs, which is why one end of it is deep as a well and the other barely wets a boot. Nobody in the village remembered his name. They remembered the lily, though, which he had planted in a fit of temper or grief, and which bloomed every August as if daring anyone to tell it otherwise.

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Saffron arrived forty years later in a tin bath on the back of a carrier's cart, a fish the colour of a marmalade jar with a white patch over one eye. Nell Sayer was seven. She named the fish before the carter had finished unloading, and by the end of that summer she was feeding her every evening from a paper twist of pellets, lying flat on the warm stones with her chin over the edge.

Saffron never came up for Nell. She came up for the ripples. Drop a pebble near the pads and she would rise from the grey stones below, slow and certain, and take whatever sank through the rings. The lily sat above it all, cream and unbothered, opening only at noon. Nell asked it once why it never looked down. The lily said nothing, which Nell took as agreement.

The August storm tore the pads loose and laid the flower on the water like a dropped glove. In the morning Nell found Saffron sheltering under the one leaf that had held, quite still. She dropped a pebble, watched the rings spread out to the stones and the reeds, and waited. After a long while the fish came up through the circles, took the pellet from her palm, and went back down, leaving the lily to float on its own.