Two pencil sketches of tattoo designs showing flowers, leaves and butterflies, one in blue pencil and one in graphite.

Floral and butterfly tattoo design sketches

Botanical · Colour · Flash

The image is a side-by-side pair of pencil drawings of floral tattoo designs. The left panel uses blue pencil on white paper, with three butterflies above a large bloom, a bud, a small blossom and sprigs of lily of the valley on a scrolling stem. The right panel uses grey-blue pencil in a sketchbook, showing several peony-like flowers, a daisy-style bloom, buds and leaves arranged along a sweeping curved band with shaded areas.

Botanical Flower Peony Butterfly Leaves Bud Sketch Stem

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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

Mind the step, that board's been loose since the winter the cut froze solid, and keep the cat in, she's had her fill of the towpath. Right then. You want the one about Nan Hetty and the blue pencil, or the one about the eel? The eel's a liar, so it's Hetty.

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Hetty drew on the back of the lock ledgers, every spare inch, with a carpenter's pencil she kept behind her ear. Peonies as big as a man's fist, because she said a flower ought to show it was worth the walk. Butterflies she'd seen dancing over Stanley's Weir in June. And always the lily of the valley, curling down the margin, because Albert had once picked a sprig of it for her on the bank at Keadby and dropped it in the river before he could hand it over. She never forgave the river and never stopped drawing the bells.

When the company sent a man round to take the ledgers back, he stood on the deck turning the pages slowly, then asked whether she'd sell the lot. Hetty said the flowers weren't for sale, but he could have the stem if he promised to draw the bud himself. He laughed, then stopped laughing, because the bud was harder than it looked. Hers always had a little shadow tucked under it, like a lamp left on in the next room.

So that's the tale. The ledgers went to a printer in Goole and the flowers ended up on tea tins, and nobody on the wharf knows the lilies were Albert's. Pass me that cup, would you? Mind, there's blue on your thumb already.