Black and white flash design of primrose flowers and leaves on two side panels with cattails and dragonflies in the centre, in an art nouveau woodcut style.

Art nouveau primrose and reed panels

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows three vertical panels in black linework on white. The two outer panels each feature a stem of primrose-like flowers with five-petalled blooms, curling buds and broad, ribbed leaves at the base. The central panel shows cattails, reed-like leaves and two dragonflies with fine striped bodies and veined wings. The work uses dense hatching, solid black fills and bold outlines, with no colour and no shading gradients.

Botanical Flower Dragonfly Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Thorne had cut the reeds the same way for thirty years, a gouge turned at the wrist so the strokes swelled and thinned like the grass itself, and he never once let Edith near the block with a tool. She was allowed to ink the proofs and count the sheets, and to dust the boxwood until the grain showed honest and pale under the gaslight.

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The commission came from a wallpaper house in Kensington: three panels, primroses to either side, cattails between, to be printed in black on cream for a music room. Thorne cut the primroses in a fortnight and grumbled at the leaves. When it came to the centre he set the block down and said the dragonflies were not his business, they were a lady's, and he would not spoil a good wing with a bad hand.

That night Edith sat with the offcuts while the workshop ticked and cooled. She took the smallest gouge from the rack, the one with the chipped heel, and tried a wing on scrap. The first cut went too deep and split the line like a dropped stitch. The second followed the vein the way Thorne's wrist would have, bending the blade a hair each stroke, until the wing held its own and the striped abdomen came up out of the wood in a ladder of pale lines.

In the morning the proof was pulled and hung to dry on the line above the sink. Thorne stood before it a long while with his cup going cold. Then he took a pencil from behind his ear, initialled the corner of the centre panel, and said nothing at all, which from him was a great deal.