Black line drawing of a botanical tattoo design with five-petal flowers, leaves and a curling vine on a white background, shown without a body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Floral vine line drawing

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The design shows three five-petal flowers joined by a curling vine, with leaves drawn in outline and hatched lines. Fine dots and small swirls fill the spaces between the main elements, and tapering strokes sweep out at the top and bottom. It is rendered in black linework on a white background with no colour or shading.

Botanical Flower Leaf Vine Swirl Dot

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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

The officer holds the cutting up to the strip light and turns it slowly, the way a jeweller turns a stone. You wrapped it in a damp tea towel and then in a freezer bag, and the plastic has fogged so the leaves look like they are underwater. Three blooms, five petals each, still tight at the tips. He asks what it is. You tell him it's a vine from your aunt's back wall in Leicester, and that she made you promise to get it across before the frost.

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He asks for the declaration form. You explain the tendrils that curl up the stem, and how your aunt traced them for you in biro on the back of a bus timetable so you'd know which curl to cut. Between the flowers she had drawn dots, dozens of them, and small swirls that went nowhere. When you asked why, she said that was where the plant kept its breath. He unfolds the timetable from your bag, looks at the drawing for a long moment, and then at the cutting again.

He doesn't say anything about his own grandmother. He just ducks behind the glass, comes back with a stamp, and presses it hard onto your form. "I'm meant to refuse this," he says. "Keep it out of the heater vents." He hands the paper back with the timetable folded inside it.

You set the bag on the dashboard with the three flowers facing the windscreen. Past the edge of the glass the road bends toward the water, and the light off the sea runs along the stem the way your aunt's pencil once ran along the drawing, looping out and back, dots scattered in every gap.