Black filigree scroll tattoo with dotwork and geometric infill, paired with soft pink shaded flowers, on the side of the torso.

Black filigree scroll with pink flowers

Botanical · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A tall black ornamental scroll with lace-like panels, dotwork and fine geometric infill runs vertically across the skin. Two or three soft, shaded pink-mauve flowers, resembling tulips or peonies, sit to the left and right of the scroll, with fading splashes around them. The image is slightly warm in tone and the composition is centred on the design.

Botanical Dotwork Ribs Scrollwork Filigree Lace Flower Tulip Leaf Dot Geometric

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Osric had been told to paint one capital S for the Book of Hours and nothing else. The abbot was particular about that. But every evening, after compline and when the scriptorium had emptied, the stem of the letter kept growing past the ruled lines, coiling down the margin the way bindweed climbs a wall, and by morning there would be a new loop of lace-work hung from it, fine as frost, each panel stitched with dots like seed heads.

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In the spring the monks' garden was dug up for the new wall, and a merchant from the coast left a sack of bulbs at the gate in thanks for prayers said over his ship. Osric pressed one red tulip between the pages of his psalter. The next morning there were three pink blooms painted at the foot of the scroll, soft at the edges as if breathed on, and his brushes still hung dry on their nail.

The abbot came down with his lamp and looked for a long time. He said the house had a rule against unbidden ornament. Then he said that the first brother who had sat at that desk, eighty years before, had also painted a scroll that would not stop, and had walked out through the cloister gate one night with nothing but his ink pot and never come back for it.

Osric did not scrape the vellum. He let the scroll run on, and when the bulbs came up that summer the tulips opened in the margin of every page he copied, so that the abbot, reading the Hours at Lauds, found the psalms growing their own small gardens down the side. Nobody on the coast could say what the merchant's ship had carried, but it came home.