Black and grey brush enso circle framed by ferns, trees, birds and a deer, drawn as a tattoo design with no body part shown.

Enso circle with ferns, trees and birds

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A bold black brush stroke forms an open circle, with its thick start and fading finish giving a sense of movement. Inside the ring, ferns, grasses and trees line the top, sides and bottom, with a small group of birds in flight at the upper left and a deer on the lower right. The design is entirely black ink on white with no colour, and the open centre leaves plenty of negative space.

Botanical Blackwork Circle Fern Tree Bird Deer Brush stroke Landscape

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the fire, it has no manners. You want the tale of how the Ring of Aumery came to have a gap in it? Then hush, because I tell it only once a winter.

Keep reading

Old Brannoch the ink-maker had a wife who could not stop painting. She painted the ferns along the riverbank, the rooks coming home over the mill, the hart that drank at the ford each dusk. The king of Aumery, a man with a bad chest and a worse temper, decided a painted wall was still a wall, so he ordered every living thing shut inside the palace yard and the paintings thrown in the lime pit.

Brannoch's wife took one brush and one pot of soot-black ink and went out to the edge of the moor at first light. She dipped once and drew a single stroke round the world, and she lifted her hand before she was finished, because the cold had got into her fingers and the ink was running thin. The line was heavy where she had pressed hardest and faint where she let go. Ferns sprang up along its edge, then grasses, then a rowan that would not be reasoned with. A flock of birds lifted off the rim and never came back down.

The king's men came at noon to scrape the lines away, but the ink had soaked into the turf and the ferns had rooted in the scraping. By the time they gave up, the hart was walking slowly through the gap, unbothered, and the king, leaning on his stick at the palace gate, watched it go and said nothing at all.

So that is why the circle is open. A thing closed entirely has no door, and a thing with no door has no one leaving it. Now bank the fire and go to bed, and if you hear something in the reeds tonight, it is only the hart, going home.