Dense paisley and floral pencil design
Black and grey · Flash
A dense, curved composition of paisley shapes, layered petals, scrolls and small rosettes filling the whole sheet on a white background. The linework is fine and even, with pencil shading and stippled dots giving depth to the inner petals and bulbous forms. The design is rendered entirely in black and grey pencil with no colour.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
Nobody at the Hollin Park reunion remembered Gemma Strickland's maths book except me, probably because I was the one who had to sit beside her for three years and watch the margins grow. By the Lower Sixth the doodles had stopped being doodles. A paisley would bloom in the corner of a quadratic, then a rosette, then a scroll that wandered down the edge of the page and disappeared under the staple.
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The school hall still smelled of floor polish and orange squash. Gemma found me by the trestle table, wearing a lanyard from the council she now works for, and I told her I still had the book. She laughed the way she used to when Mr Pollard read out her work in front of everyone. "Did he ever finish confiscating it?" she asked. He had, in a way. He kept it for a week, then returned it with one line in red ink: Finish the sum first.
I drove home with the window down and the book on the passenger seat, and I turned to the last page, the one she'd filled after the exams had stopped mattering. Every petal had a second petal inside it, every dot was stippled with a patience I have never had. In the bottom corner, where the design ran off the paper, one lobe was still bare, outlined and waiting. Beside it, in her neat small hand, she had written: still counting.
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