Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman in profile with lilies line drawing

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink line drawing shows a woman in profile with her hair swept into a bun, set inside a thin circle. Large lilies with flowing petals and stems fill the lower half of the image, with small dots scattered around the upper edges. The linework is even and uncoloured, on a plain pale background, with the flowers framing the figure symmetrically.

Botanical Woman Profile Lily Flower Stem Circle Bubble

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the gravy stain on the settee. I'll tell you about Miss Halloran, who took the back room at Gull Crest the summer the harbour froze over, which it never does, and who kept a crate of lily bulbs under her bed the way other women keep their wedding silver.

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She'd bought them off a nurseryman in Penzance, and she set them in the sand behind the boundary wall where nothing grows but thrift. Every morning she walked out to the headland with a hand mirror wrapped in a tea towel, and every evening she came back with her stockings wet to the knee. The fishermen said she was touched. My mother said she was waiting, and that was worse, because waiting on the sea is a trade in itself.

The lilies came up white in September, when no lily has any business being out. Young Tom from the milk cart saw her cutting them at dawn with the kitchen scissors. When he asked who they were for, she said they were not for sale and not for him, they were for the water. Then she walked down the steps to the rocks and dropped each bloom into the surf, one after another, and bubbles came up round her skirts like someone had poured fizz into the bay.

The boat she was waiting on never came back, and nobody saw her leave. But when the tide went out next morning, there were lily heads printed on the wet sand all the way to the water's edge, and a single bubble sat trembling in the rock pool like a full stop. So that's why nobody on this street picks lilies from the cliff, and why the gardener won't cut them even for the church. Now, who wants the last of the custard? It's going to waste.