Black and white drawing of an ornate fleur-de-lis surrounded by acanthus leaf scrollwork and radiating lines, shown as a flash design with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fleur-de-lis with scrollwork design

Black and grey · Flash

A stylised fleur-de-lis sits at the centre of the design, with its petals and base shaded in white and grey engraving-style lines. Acanthus leaves and curling scrollwork frame it on both sides, with a thin circle and fine radiating rays behind the motif. The image is a monochrome drawing on a solid black background, with the ornament centred and evenly balanced.

Fleur-de-lis Scrollwork Ray Circle Ornament

Find an artist for this

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

On the north wing of the old infirmary there was a night porter called Ada Crane, who had a lamp no one else was allowed to touch. It was brass, shaped like a lily with three petals standing up like a crown, and it had been her grandmother's before the building was ever a hospital. When the power failed in the winter of the big storm, Ada lit it and carried it up the stairs, and the corridors came up pale and steady around her.

Keep reading

The nurses on the children's ward said the light did not flicker the way the electric lamps did. It threw rays across the ceiling, thin as wire, and in the rays a faint circle hung like a halo that moved when you looked away. Mr Hollis, who had been a sexton before he was a patient, said the lamp was a promise and the rays were its terms. Ada said he talked too much for a man with a catheter.

On the third night of the outage a boy in bed nine stopped breathing, and the monitors had gone dark with the rest of the wing. Ada ran with the lamp held high. The carved leaves at its base caught the light and pushed it outward in curls, so that the whole ward seemed to grow rich with scrolled shadow, and she found the bed without looking. She counted the breaths by feel, the way her grandmother had taught her, and the boy coughed and began again.

Afterwards the power came back and the lamp went onto its hook in the porters' cupboard, cold and ordinary. Nobody asked Ada where she had learned to find a bed in the dark. She only said that a lamp that old remembers the way, and that you should never ask it for more than that.