Black ink drawing of a scrolling vine with curls and small dots on a white background, shown as a tattoo design with no body part visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black scrolling vine design

Black and grey · Flash

A black ornamental design of a vine with several spiral curls, leaf-like scrolls and small dots branching from a central stem. The linework is solid and filled, with no shading or grey tones, and the design sits in the centre of a plain white background. It reads as a stencil or flash-style tattoo design rather than a photograph of skin.

Vine Scroll Swirl Curl Dot Ornament

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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

You have been told the curl must come off the brush in one breath, not two, and you have ruined eleven tins of black gloss learning it. The barge Marigold lies against the towpath at Hythe Lock with her side bare, and Mr Pardoe wants her scrolled by Saturday, when the boat show comes up the cut and the judges walk the bank with clipboards.

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The first morning you draw the stem freehand, a long wandering line that climbs from the waterline toward the rail. Then you let the leaves fall off it, one swirl after another, the way the bindweed on the hedge keeps spilling over itself. Dots go in last, flicked from the tip of the brush with a stiff little jerk of the wrist, and each one shines wet in the sun before it dries dull. Pardoe watches from a folding chair with a flask on his knee and says nothing, which you have learned means yes.

On Friday a narrowboat with a broken rudder drifts down from the north, and its owner, a woman in a yellow cagoule, shouts across the water that she has been looking for a painter called Dacre for thirty years. You tell her he died in the spring. She studies your scrolls for a long time, then the ones on the boat beside them, and says the hand is the same, the curl turned under like a fist. You do not ask her what she means. You dip the brush again.

On Saturday the judges come and walk past without stopping, and the prize goes to a castle painted in the old style. You are not surprised. Pardoe pours two cups from the flask and hands you one, and only then do you notice a tiny swirl at the bottom corner of the rail, under the paint you laid down yourself on Tuesday. It is his mark, you realise, and you have been making it all week without knowing whose it was.