Black and grey botanical line drawing of an aster-like flower with buds on slender stems, suitable as a flash design for a tattoo.

Aster stems and buds in engraved line

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a tall aster-style flower head at the top, with a second smaller bloom partway down, several closed buds and a few thin leaves along the stems. The linework is fine and hatched, with dense parallel strokes shaping the petals and the centre of each flower. The image is monochrome on a plain white background, with the whole plant arranged vertically and centred on the page.

Botanical Fine line Flower Bud Stem Leaf Wildflower

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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

The frost had already silvered the gorse when Ada Tremayne found the last aster on Scarrow Head, standing alone above the wall where the sheep never went. Its head was still open, a crown of narrow petals laid back like the rays of a sun drawn by someone in a hurry, and the centre was packed tight with yellow grit. Below it the stem branched thin and wiry, with three buds hanging closed, dark-scaled and pointed as drawing pins.

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Her brother Jory had sent her up with the seed tin and his old scissors. "Take what you need and go," he said, which was his way of saying the lease on the cottage ended at Michaelmas. She knelt in the wet grass and counted. Four heads had already gone to fluff in the tin, and the rest rattled brown and empty. This one she meant to leave for the wind. The bud nearest the ground had split a fraction, a single pale line showing like a seam in a glove.

She thought of the engraver in Penzance who had drawn asters for the seed catalogues, hatching every petal with strokes so close they looked like rain. He had told her once that the shaded side of a flower was where the light went to think. She sat back on her heels and let the cold come up through her skirt. Down the hill the church bell struck seven, late, the way it always did when the ringer's hands were stiff.

When she got home Jory had already carried the tin to the car. She told him about the bud. He didn't look up from the boxes. Ada went to the dresser, took down the almanac and pressed the split bud between two pages marked for October. In the morning it would still be shut, keeping its pale seam the way a door keeps its latch.