Fine line flash sheet in black ink showing a moth, skull, cat, blackberry, hands, sprigs and a sleeping fawn, arranged on a pale grey background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Botanical and animal flash sheet

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A flash sheet of separate line drawings arranged in a loose cluster on a pale grey background. The motifs include a hawk moth, an animal skull, a curled cat, a blackberry cluster, a fawn lying down, a peony with leaves, a pair of hands holding stems and several botanical sprigs. The linework is fine and even, with shading done through hatching and dots, and the sheet is entirely black ink with no colour.

Fine line Botanical Moth Skull Cat Blackberry Hand Fawn Peony Rose Sprig Berry Lavender Leaves Antler Wreath Branch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fruit stall on Carrow Street has pulled its shutters down, but the lamp above the flower seller's door is still burning, and a hawk moth keeps knocking against the glass as though it has an appointment inside. You stop because the moth is so exact in its stripes, and because the woman in the doorway is already holding out a bunch of stems before you have asked for anything.

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Lavender, she says, and a few canes of blackberry bound with green string. Nothing for the cat asleep on the wall, nothing for the fawn curled in the yard behind the crates, nothing for the skull the bin men left on the kerb. Take them home and put them somewhere the light cannot reach. You say thank you, and she is already drawing the door to, one hand on the bolt, the other tucked into her coat pocket.

The walk home takes you past the bus shelter and the bins. The cat has curled itself as tight as a fist, and the gutter holds a fox skull grinning up at the sodium light. The moth follows the whole way, bumping at your shoulder, a small heavy thing with a skull painted on its back like a warning on an old boat. At the flat you climb four flights, and it rests on the banister until you open the door.

You put the lavender in a jam jar on the sill and lay the blackberry cane beside it, and you sleep without closing the curtains. By morning the sill holds only the jar, a purple thumbprint dried on the glass where the berries were, and the moth has gone back to whatever lamp it was made for.