Pencil drawing of a botanical vine with leaves, swirls and a central flower, drawn as a tattoo design with no body placement shown.

Floral vine corner design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a curling vine with pointed leaves, tendrils and spirals that sweep from the top right to the lower left, with a large open flower and a small centred bud near the bottom. The linework is thin and even, with pencil shading on the leaves and petals to suggest light and depth. The design is in greyscale and fills an L-shaped corner of the page, with plenty of empty space above and to the left.

Botanical Vine Leaf Flower Swirl Tendril Bud Floral

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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

Mrs Harriet Coote had sent the pattern back twice, each time with a pencilled note in the margin asking for the leaves to be lighter. Ada sharpened her pencil again at the kitchen table, the gas turned low under the kettle, and tried to work out what lighter could mean for a thing that was meant to be a vine.

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She had drawn the corner in one long sweep, starting at the top of the sheet where the tendril curled like a question mark and letting it fall past the rows of pointed leaves until it reached the bottom left, where it turned back on itself to make room for the flower. The flower was the difficulty. Mrs Coote wanted it open, the way her late husband's roses had been open in the photograph on her piano at Sneinton, and Ada had given it five broad petals and a crowded heart of dots, shaded so the edges lifted off the paper.

On the third evening she licked her thumb and rubbed the shadows on the leaves until they were nearly gone, then sat back and looked at what remained. The vine seemed to breathe now. The light came through it from somewhere up near the window, as if the sheet had been left out in a garden all summer.

She posted it the next morning with the bud at the bottom still untouched, a small closed knot of graphite no bigger than a thumbnail. It was the only part she had not finished. Her mother used to say you always kept one thing back for yourself, and Ada had never been sure whether that was wisdom or just untidiness. She wrote her own initials beside it in the margin, very small, where Mrs Coote would have to hold the page up to the lamp to find them.