Black ink line drawing of New Zealand's two islands filled with roses, ferns and swirling linework, on white paper.

Floral map of New Zealand in line work

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink drawing of New Zealand's North and South Islands, with the outline filled by roses, leaves, ferns and curling tendrils. The linework is fine and even, with stippled dots and small loops building the floral detail. The design is monochrome on a plain white background, with no shading beyond the line work.

Fine line Botanical Map Rose Fern Leaves Flower Floral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rose cuttings had been wrapped in wet flannel for forty-one days, and by the time the barque Cressida Vane rounded the Horn, Mabel Quirke had stopped pretending she did not check them every watch. She kept them in a biscuit tin lined with oilcloth, wedged under her bunk where the hold's damp could not reach. The mate called it foolishness. The cook, a Dundee man named Tam Rennie, said it was a sin to waste good tin.

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Off the Chatham Islands she unwrapped one cutting and found a sliver of green at the node. Nothing more. She folded the flannel back and sat on the locker with the pencil she had brought from her father's office, sketching the coastline from memory: the long northern hook, the cleft of the strait, the southern limb trailing toward the ice. Where the bays ran deep she drew fern fronds. Along the river mouths she drew roses, because her father had promised her a garden with a view of the harbour, and she meant to hold him to it.

At Port Chalmers the agent came aboard with a clipboard and asked what was in the tin. "Ferns," she said, which was half true. He peered in and saw only pale roots in wet rag, shrugged, and waved her down the gangway. She carried the tin up the hill herself, past the chandlers and the Presbyterian kirk, and did not stop until the soil was turned and the cuttings were in.

The first rose opened in the second November, pale pink and loose at the centre. Mabel cut one stem for Tam's wife, who had laughed at her on the wharf, and kept the rest for herself. The pencil sketch went into her father's old drawer, its corners curled soft as a coastline that had decided, against all the charts, to hold its shape.