Black and grey fine line fleur-de-lis tattoo with a dotted circle above, on the upper back between the shoulder blades, in front of a patterned textile.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fine line fleur-de-lis on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph from behind of a person with dark hair tied up, showing a small fleur-de-lis tattoo centred on the upper back. The design is drawn in thin black lines with a dotted circle above the top petal and a long, single vertical stem running down below the scrollwork. The tattoo is in black ink only, set against plain skin with a black and white patterned textile in the background.

Fine line Back Fleur-de-lis Circle Dot Line Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Oswin had taught me that a lily must be drawn from the stem up, never from the petals down, or the whole thing sags like wet linen. I had been at the scriptorium of Saint Crispin's for three winters, and I still had not been trusted with a capital that mattered. The lilies in the psalter were for the older men.

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In March the abbot's clerk died of a cough nobody bothered to name, and the charter for the mill at Wenlow fell to me. Its margin needed the abbey's mark, the three-petalled flower bound with a ribbon. I cut my quill fine, ruled the faint guide lines with a bone stylus, and set to work with the lamp hung low so the ink would not skin over. My hand wanted to hurry. Oswin came behind me, lifted the candle, and said nothing for so long that I thought I had ruined it.

When he finally spoke, it was about the stem. 'You lifted the pen,' he said, pointing at a hair's break near the base. 'Do it again, and this time do not stop until the line finds the foot of the page.' I did. The stem ran down straight as a plumb line, one breath held from the top of the flower to the bottom edge of the sheet, and when I looked up he was smiling in the way he only did at Lauds.

I drew the small ring above the top petal last, a dotted circle for the sun that rose over the mill each morning, and the abbot signed beneath it before the ink was dry. Oswin has been dead eleven years now. The charter still hangs in the chapter house, and the stem still runs straight down past the seal, unbroken, like a question nobody ever needed to answer.