Black ink botanical line drawing of a leaf-shaped spray of roses, swirls and hatched foliage on a stem, in a fine line style, with no body placement shown.

Floral leaf line drawing

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A leaf-shaped spray rises from a single stem, built from clusters of roses, tulip-like blooms, curling tendrils and hatched leaves. The fine black linework uses dense hatching and stippled dots to shade the petals and leaves, with no grey wash. The design is centred on a plain white background with generous space around the motif.

Botanical Fine line Leaf Rose Flower Swirl Foliage Stem Hatching

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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

Sit closer, the lamp is nearly out and I will not shout for the ones at the back. You want the scribe with the quick hand? Then hush, because this is the part where the river listens.

Keep reading

In Ur-Hadad, where the canals ran thick with reed, lived a scribe called Ishmerah whose hand was too quick for the temple. Every rose she inked came out curled, every tendril wanted a second curl, and the overseers sent her pages back again and again. Her father had drowned that spring, leaving her a jar of soot ink and a roll of papyrus, so she spent her nights writing the names of the dead in the margins of the wall-lists, because nobody else would take the work.

One night a leaf grew on her page. It had no stem she remembered drawing, only a single black line running down from the corner, thick at the root where the ink had pooled. She followed it with her finger the way you would follow a wet rope. Next morning she carried the page to the canal, knelt in the mud, and pressed the stalk into the bank with her thumb.

By the new moon a spray of roses had climbed out of that mud, tulip-like heads opening over the water, tendrils coiling round the reeds. The overseers came to see the miracle and went away pleased to be wrong. Ishmerah never wrote another name in the margins. She let the roses do the writing, and the river, they say, still reads them.