Black ink line drawing on white paper of a swirling, paisley-style design with two flowers, a leaf and a row of small open circles, shown as a tattoo design.

Black ink swirl and flower design

Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a single design built from curling scrolls, a five-petal flower near the bottom left, a spiked, flower-like motif on the right and a cluster of small open circles at the top. A tapering stem runs down from the lower flower. The linework is bold, even black ink with some solid filled areas along the curls, and there is no colour or shading. The design is centred on a plain pale background with plenty of space around it.

Swirl Flower Dot Leaf Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had been drawing the same thing for nineteen days, a curl that opened into a flower and then a second curl that refused to stop. The pen was a cheap fountain pen she had bought in Falmouth, and it bled a little into the damp pages of the mess log, so every line carried a soft grey shadow. Mr Okonedo, the bosun, leaned over her shoulder at the change of watch and said it looked like a fern that had been stepped on.

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The bubbles were her own idea. Each morning the cook, a quiet man called Tobi, beat the flour dust off the galley hatch, and she counted the specks that rose into the grey light and drew them as small open rings above the swirls. Three weeks out, the freighter had crossed a shoal of something silver off the Cape Verde Islands, and the water had boiled with them. She had tried to draw that too, and ended up with a cluster of circles that looked like breath.

On the twentieth morning the captain found her on the foredeck with the logbook open on a coil of rope. He read the page, then the one before, and tapped the stem that tapered down towards the edge. "That's our wake," he said. "Look where the lower flower sits. That's where we were when the engine dropped out." She had not known she was keeping a record of anything at all. He held the book up to the light so the ink showed through from the back, a whole month of bent lines running the wrong way across the sea.

Nell took the pen from behind her ear and, at the very end of the stem, drew one more small flower where the ship would be by morning. The captain let her keep the book.