Solid black fleur-de-lis design with curling scrollwork flourishes on either side, shown on a plain white background with no body placement visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fleur-de-lis with swirling scrollwork

Black and grey · Flash

A solid black fleur-de-lis sits at the centre, with its three petals rising from a bold base. Thin curling scrolls extend outwards from each side, creating a symmetrical, ornamental band. The design is rendered in flat black on white with no shading or colour.

Fleur-de-lis Scrollwork Swirl Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, because the fire's been cut down and this is the part where the old ones lie. You want to know why the chart in the Pellow's Quay chart room has a lily where the north should be? Then hush and listen.

Keep reading

Tamsin Carrow kept that room above the net loft, and she had a steady hand with a crow quill and a bad temper for anyone who asked her to hurry. Every spring the Admiralty men sent up their fair copies and she made them right. She put the lily on the north point because her grandfather said the French had taught the first sailors to trust it, and a lily that had been pointing men home for three hundred years deserved better than the margin.

The winter the Gannet went out and did not come back, Tamsin sat up with the lamp and drew that north point over and over. Each lily came out lopsided. The scrolls kept running off the edge of the paper like smoke off a wick. Her brother's wife climbed the stairs with broth and found her crying into the ink pot, and said, Tam, the sea doesn't read maps.

Tamsin said nothing. She finished the lily with its curling scrolls, the way her grandfather drew them, and pinned the sheet to the wall where the fishermen could see it from the slipway. Come March, the Gannet limped in under a jury mast, steered by a boy who swore the lily on that chart had shown him the harbour mouth. Nobody ever found the boat's name in the logbook, but the lily stayed on the chart, and that, my darlings, is why the north is a flower.