Black and grey botanical drawing of a clover flower head and trefoil leaves on a long curving stem, in the style of a tattoo flash design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Clover blossom and leaves line drawing

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A clover flower head, with densely packed florets, sits at the top of a long curving stem. Three trefoil leaves are drawn beside it, with fine hatching and cross-hatching used for shading and texture. The drawing is rendered in black ink on a plain white background, with the subject centred in the frame.

Botanical Clover Flower Leaf Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The logbook came to me in a crate of wet tide tables, its spine split and its boards swollen like bread. Mrs Penhallow at the harbour office wanted the entries for 1911 copied before the damp finished them, and she wanted them done by someone who would not tidy the margins. I have mended paper in the back room of the chandlery on Hallow Quay for twenty-six years, and I know what tidiness costs a page.

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Tucked between the entries for the Mary Ann and the Dorcas Jane was a single sheet of laid paper, a clover head drawn so closely that the florets seemed to jostle for room. Beside it ran a long curving stem, and beside that three trefoil leaves, shaded with hatching so fine I had to lift my lamp to see where one line stopped and the next began. Someone had given it a week at least. Beneath the drawing, in a neat hand, were the words: For Tom, who counts them.

I did not recognise a Tom in the harbour records, so I went looking. The crew list for the Dorcas Jane named a Thomas Rowe, nineteen, deckhand, who went out on the morning ebb and did not come back on the flood. The drawing was signed Ada, and her letters were cramped, as if the pen had been held in cold fingers.

I finished the copying on a Thursday. At the foot of the sheet, where the stem ran off the bottom edge as though it had never been meant to stop, Ada had pencilled one more line, so faint I nearly missed it: Still three. Mrs Penhallow asked what it meant. I told her it was a count, and that somebody had kept it.