Pencil sketch of a circular tattoo design split into quadrants, with black tribal-style vines, leaves and spirals.

Circular tribal vine and swirl design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a circular design divided into four quadrants by a cross. The left side holds a branching vine with curled tendrils and leaf shapes, while the right side has spiky, flame-like tendrils and spiral scrolls. The linework is bold and solid in black, with no shading or colour, and the motifs fill the circle evenly.

Botanical Geometric Vine Leaf Spiral Scroll Circle Tendril

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mattie Penhale had the tide table turned over and a carpenter's pencil in her fist when the gate order came through. She drew the circle with a jam jar lid because her compass had gone to the bottom of the harbour with her uncle's skiff. Her father, Joss, leaned on the forge bench and watched her cross the thing into quarters as if she were cutting a pie for a crowd that had not yet arrived.

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"Left side grows," she said. "Right side burns. That's what the chapel committee wants, one half for the living and one for the lamps."

"Lamps don't need curls," Joss said.

"Lamps need something to hang off." She shaded nothing, because he had always told her black was enough. The vines climbed the left like ivy finding a drainpipe, tendrils coiling where a breath would stop them. On the right she let the fire lick out in sharp spikes, the sort that would cut your palm if you touched the iron before it cooled, and at the foot of it she set three spirals, tight as fists.

The gate went up in March, when the wind came straight off the breakwater. Rain ran down the vine side and beaded in the scrolls. Behind the fire side the lamp caught every spike and threw a broken orange across the path, so anyone walking through had to choose which half to step into. Mattie watched from the wall with the pencil behind her ear. Her father, who had never once said he liked a drawing, came and stood beside her and laid a hand flat on the cold iron where the spirals began, the way you'd check that a sleeping animal was still breathing.