Blue and white floral design with scrolling leaves on a white square, shown on a textured khaki fabric background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue floral design on white backing

Botanical · Colour · Flash

A single round flower with layered petals sits at the centre, surrounded by curling scrolls, leaves and small buds. The linework is fine and the shading uses graduated tones of blue on white, giving a porcelain-like effect. The design is centred on a white rectangle against a textured olive fabric.

Botanical Flower Floral Scroll Leaves Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The kiln had cooled overnight, and Master Vos would not let me touch the tiles until he had looked at each one under the north window. He held a blue-glazed plate up to the light the way a sexton holds a candle to a headstone, turning it slowly until the cobalt went from ink to smoke. 'Too many scrolls,' he said finally. 'The ladies of Haarlem want air between their petals.'

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The flower was my task. Every morning I painted the same round bloom forty times with a quill of squirrel hair, layering its petals in tones paler and paler until the white tin glaze showed through like frost on a pane. Vos had copied it from a bowl that came off a ship from Batavia, and he swore the man who first painted it had never seen a real flower, only heard one described by a sailor who was drunk.

One grey afternoon, with the kettle singing on the hob and nobody watching, I added a bud where no bud belonged, a small curl of blue tucked beneath the lowest scroll, no bigger than a fly's foot. Vos found it at the firing. He did not scold me. He ran his thumb across the glaze, laughed once through his nose, and set the tile on the shelf with the seconds, where it stayed for thirty years.

When the house on the Oude Delft was emptied after his death, the auctioneer's clerk turned that tile over, read the flaw in its border, and wrote imperfect in the margin of his ledger. It fetched a single guilder. I have always thought it the only honest thing we ever made, because the master's name is nowhere on it, and the one small mistake I hid there is the part that outlived him.