Digital drawing of a tattoo design with a bold black symbol above yellow daffodils, purple asters, pink buds and black vine swirls, shown without a body placement.

Daffodils and asters with a black symbol and swirls

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

A bold black symbol sits at the top of the composition, with two purple asters, two yellow daffodils and two pink buds arranged along curling black vines below it. The solid black shapes have smooth outlines and the flowers have soft shading and fine petal lines, with the vines finished in thick black linework. The design is shown on a plain white background with the elements centred and balanced.

Botanical Daffodil Flower Bud Vine Swirl Symbol

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The steward's widow had been planting in the broken ward for eleven winters before anyone at Harrowgate thought to ask her why. She said the castle had been built on a bargain, and bargains wanted tending the way soil did. Her neighbours laughed, but they came to buy her bulbs in February, when the daffodils pushed through the frost along the foot of the curtain wall, and they stopped laughing when the asters bloomed late into October, purple as bruises, over the rubble where the great hall had burned.

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Her grandson Aled asked her once what the bargain was. She was on her knees with a trowel and did not look up. Two people had climbed the keep stair in the old days, she said, one who was to be lord and one who was only a servant, and the lord had sworn to take no wife who was not his equal. The servant had gone to the sea. The lord had waited on the wall until the stones came down around him, and the wall had grown over with yellow flowers because he would not let them be pulled.

Aled did not believe her. He went up the stair that night with a lamp and found, on the lintel of the old chapel door, two strokes of black iron worked into the stone, leaning towards each other like folk bowing over a cradle. Beneath them the vines had cracked the mortar, and their curling stems wound round the carving as though holding it up.

He came down before dawn, cold and furious, and found the widow standing in the ward. She had set a pink bud by the door that had not been there at dusk. "There," she said. "Now it's finished."