Flash sheet of five traditional-style flower designs with red, yellow and orange petals and dark green shaded leaves on a pale background.

Five traditional flower designs on a flash sheet

Traditional · Colour · Flash

Five flower designs are arranged across a pale sheet, each with a central bloom of layered petals and a radial pattern, surrounded by dark green leaves. The linework is bold and black, with the leaves shaded in hatched green and the petals filled with flat red, orange and yellow. The flowers vary in size and arrangement, with the largest two on the left and the smaller designs placed to the right.

Traditional Botanical Flower Rose Leaves Mandala Flash sheet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the seedtrays. My grandmother's grandmother kept a sheet of flowers pinned above the hydroponic bay on the Halden Reach, and she swore every one of those five blooms was a different ship's garden. You can tell by the leaves. Dark green, hatched fine as rigging, drawn that way so the light would have somewhere to hide.

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The big red one on the left, the one with the white eye at its heart, was the Marrow, a slow hull that lost her hydrologist to a coolant leak in the third decade out. The keeper planted that bloom in his memory and the crew called it the Stubborn Rose. The smaller ones to the right were cuttings taken from it, tucked into pots by children who did not know the story and did not need to.

When the Reach finally made orbit round Tessaly, the air was thin and the soil was grey as ash. Nothing green would take. Then Oma Ruth, who ran the bay with a sharpened spoon and no patience, unpinned the sheet and laid it on the bench. A picture of a flower with its petals in order, she said, was a promise of order, and if we could not grow the plant we could at least grow the promise. So we dug. We found a seam of dark loam under the bluff, and the first red petal came up through it the spring I turned nine.

The sheet is long gone to damp, but the seam is still there under the bluff. Go and look at it on a clear morning, when the light comes in low and the leaves catch it the way the old hands meant them to.