Black ink flash design of a horizontal scrolling border with stylised flowers, buds and leaves on a white background, with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black scrolling floral border band

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A long horizontal band of black ornamental scrollwork, with stylised flower heads, buds and leaf shapes linked by curling vines. The linework is solid and uniform with no shading, and the design is set against a plain white background. The composition is symmetrical and narrow, suited to a border or strip.

Botanical Scrollwork Flower Bud Leaf Vine Border Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The paint on the bandwagon had cracked like old pastry, and Mr Haskett wanted it sorted before the Saturday matinee in Doncaster, so I was up the stepladder at six with a squirrel-hair brush and a tin of gloss the colour of wet coal. The scrollwork ran the whole length of the wagon, a band of vines, buds and flower heads my grandfather had laid down in 1951 with nothing but a ruler and a bad temper. I was copying the lines back in as they had been, one curl at a time, while the rest of the company loaded the last of the rigging into the lorry.

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Nell Pargeter sat on the steps with a flask and watched me. She had ridden the grey mare for thirty years before her hip gave out, and she still knew every bloom on that border by name. 'Mind the third one,' she said. 'Your grandad hid the girls' initials in the petals. That's Ada's.'

'Ada left in March,' I said.

'Aye, she did. Ada left, the Hendersons took the big top, and they'll take the wagon too if we can't pay the grazing.' She unscrewed the flask and didn't drink from it. 'Paint it anyway. Somebody should see it properly before it goes.'

So I painted Ada's petals, then the next bloom and the next, until the sun came round the side of the field and lit the gloss so the black looked wet. When I climbed down, the vine ran clean from one end of the wagon to the other, and Nell reached up with one knuckle and touched the third flower, as if checking it was dry.