Black line drawing of a fleur-de-lis with hatched shading on a white background, shown as a tattoo design rather than on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fleur-de-lis line drawing

Black and grey · Flash

The image shows a fleur-de-lis drawn in bold black outline with fine hatched lines across the petals and central band. The shading is built from parallel strokes and curved contours, with no fill beyond the black ink lines. The design is centred on a plain white background.

Fleur-de-lis Lily Emblem

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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

The brass was already cut when Mr Ottery sent for me, the north point of a sixteen-inch chart standing bare where the lily should go. He wanted the fleur-de-lis drawn wide, petals sweeping out like a gull's wings, and he wanted it to look as though it had been there since the first surveyor sailed past the Scillies. I told him the Admiralty pattern had a plain arrow. He said the Admiralty had never bought from us.

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I spent three evenings at the bench with the lens and the burnisher. Every stroke had to fall the same way. The hatching on the centre blade ran toward the cord, the outer petals curled against it, and the band across the waist had to be cut in four rings, each thinner than a fishbone, so the eye read it as binding and not as ornament. My hand shook on the second night, so I set the tool down, drank the tea gone cold beside the vice, and went back in with a clearer head.

When the plate was finished I carried a proof down to the harbour office and pulled it on the old press. Mr Ottery held the sheet up to the window and said nothing for a long while. Then he laid his thumb on the central blade, where I had cut the grain so fine it took no ink at all, and told me a navigator would never look at that point. He would only look at which way it pointed.

I took my pay and the spoiled proof home and tacked it above the kettle, where it stayed. Forty years on, my granddaughter asked why there was a lily on a chart of a sea nobody sails anymore. I told her it was the one mark on the whole sheet I had made without anyone checking my sums.