Black and grey botanical tattoo of a small flower with curling swirls and dots, placed on the inner ear.

Flower and swirl tattoo inside an ear

Botanical · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo of a five-petalled flower with a dotted centre sits on the inner ear, with a curling stem of swirls and small dots trailing downwards. The linework is fine and even, with minimal shading, and the design is shown in sharp focus against soft grey skin tones. The close, slightly angled composition places the tattoo at the centre of the frame.

Botanical Fine line Other Flower Swirl Dot Ear

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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

My uncle Tiberios said a seal must be small enough to hide under a thumbnail and clear enough to be read across a crowded harbour. He said it every morning over the wheel, while bronze dust settled on the lamp oil and the Nile barges knocked against the quay beyond the shop on Canopus Street.

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The commission came on a wet afternoon from a widow who wanted a signet for her late husband's ledgers. She did not want a crest or a name. She wanted a five-petalled flower, the kind that grows in the cracks of the harbour walls, with a stem of curls trailing down from it like smoke off a wick. I cut it with a diamond point over eleven nights. The petals took the most time. The dots took the rest, sixty of them, each pressed by hand so that no two sat quite the same distance from the centre.

My brother Demetrios sailed for Ostia two winters ago and has not written. Uncle says a man who does not write has either forgotten his mother's name or is too proud to admit he cannot find the ink. I did not argue. When the widow's ledgers were stamped and paid for, I kept the offcut of wax that had caught the first clean impression, and that night I cut a second, smaller seal for no one in particular.

I pressed it into a fresh tablet, folded it, and wrote only his name on the outside. The flower came up sharp in the wax, dots and all. Tomorrow a grain ship leaves for Ostia. Before I hand it over I will count the sixty dots aloud, one for every day he has kept his silence, and then I will stop counting.