Black line drawing of a bold flourish scroll with curled tendrils on a white background, a possible tattoo design with no placement shown.

Black flourish scroll design

Black and grey · Flash

The image shows a single black ornamental flourish made of tapering curved strokes and spiral curls, arranged in a vertical S-shaped form. The linework varies from thick, solid tapered strokes to fine, thin lines, and the design is entirely in black ink on a plain white background. The composition is centred and symmetrical in its overall flow, with no body part, shading or colour present.

Scroll Swirl Flourish Curl Ornament

Find an artist for this

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

Now mind the gate, because my grandmother always said the garden remembers who leaves it open. The Hallorans had the big house on the hill then, and their gardener was a man called Tobias Wren, who could coax a climbing rose out of a dry stone wall if you gave him a week and a bad temper. He had one job he never let anyone else do, which was the iron scrollwork around the sundial. Every morning he bent the ferns back and brushed the spirals clean with a hog's hair brush, and every morning the curls came out a little tighter than the day before.

Keep reading

The Halloran girl, Maud, was nine that summer and bored past bearing. She kept asking him what the curls were for. He told her they were where the wind went to sleep, that each tail was a thread the wind had dropped on its way over the hill. She didn't believe him, so she sat on the bench and counted them, and when she got to the bottom she found one loop nobody had polished. It was tucked under the plinth, thin as a hair, and it was still warm.

She pulled it free. Out came a length of black ribbon, then a dozen more, unspooling from the sundial's shadow until the whole lawn was looped in ink-dark tails. Tobias came running out with his brush raised, and then he stopped, and he sat down on the grass beside her, and he said, quite calmly, that she had better tie a knot before the wind woke up. She did, and it did, and the sundial has been telling the wrong time ever since.