Photograph of a flash sheet of hand-drawn doodle motifs, including leaves, sprigs, dots and seed heads, in black and red ink.

Doodled leaves and sprigs flash sheet

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

A sheet of pen-drawn flash designs arranged in rows across the page, mostly in black ink with some in red. The motifs include leaves, sprigs, seed heads, dotted lines, small arrows and a few abstract shapes. The linework is simple and loose, with cross-hatching and stippling in places, and the composition is dense and evenly spaced.

Botanical Leaf Sprig Seed head Dot Arrow Doodle Flower Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The order book for Haskett and Sons had gone missing twice that month, so I was set to copy the Michaelmas invoices onto clean paper, which gave me four hours at the back bench with a dip pen and nothing to stop my hand wandering. By the third hour the margins had filled with sprigs. I drew them without thinking: a leaf split down the middle, a seed head like a pepper pot, three dots trailing off to an arrow that pointed nowhere in particular.

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Mr Haskett came through at four with his watch chain swinging and stopped at my elbow. He held the sheet up to the window. I waited for the word spoilt. Instead he asked whether the arrows were meant to mean something, and I said they meant they had got away from me. He took a red pencil from his waistcoat and drew a seed head beside one of mine, a little firmer than I would have, and said the lads at the packing benches would need something to tell the sweet peas from the parsnips.

By March the sheet was pinned above the packing bench, and every paper packet leaving the Spalding works carried one of my doodles in its corner, the leaves in black and the marigold seed in a dull red from the bottle I used for rubrics. Customers wrote asking after the little fellows on the packets. Mr Haskett kept their letters in the drawer with the order book, which had turned up under a sack of onion sets.

On the last morning of the month I found one of my sprigs on a packet bought by a woman in Lincoln, who had pencilled on the back that she meant to copy it into her own garden book. My red ink was still on my cuff. I let it stay there.