Black and grey dotwork design of queen Anne's lace and wildflowers in front of a circle and overlapping triangles, drawn on white paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dotwork botanical flowers with geometric circle

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A drawn tattoo design of queen Anne's lace, a closed bud, fern-like leaves and a spiky seed head, with a stem that tapers to a point. The flowers and leaves are built from stippled dots and fine lines, set in front of a dotted mandala-style circle with two overlapping outline triangles at the base. It is rendered in black ink on white paper with no colour.

Dotwork Botanical Geometric Wildflower Bud Leaves Fern Seed head Stem Circle Mandala Triangle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit down, the lot of you, and mind the kettle. You want to know why Mrs Hallam never let anyone pick the queen's lace off the verge by the railway. I'll tell you, though it's not a story for the faint-hearted. It was the summer the council sprayed the lane, and the whole village went out with secateurs to cut the white heads down before the men came. Except old Agnes Pyle, who stood in the middle of the road with her arms out, holding a bunch of it like a bride's posy, and she said, you'll cut these over my body.

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They left her be. Nobody wanted a fuss, and she was ninety if she was a day. So she went home, put the lace in a jam jar on the windowsill, and that night the moon came up round and pale over the chapel roof, the way it does in August, and the dots of light on the water-butt looked just like the stipple on her grandfather's ink drawings. He'd been a surveyor, you see. He drew everything with a nib and a little brown pot of patience, every seed and every fern, and he taught her that a thing is only real once you've counted it.

So she counted. She sat up with the jam jar and the moon and counted every white umbel until the sun came back. And in the morning, the lane was green again, untouched, because the men had got bored and gone to the pub. Agnes had her lace, and the bud she'd kept back from the pile had opened in the jar, one small pink knot of new life, and she pressed it flat in her hymn book where it's still kept. Now go on, get out of my chair.