Pencil sketch of a flowering stem with a large five-petal bloom, leaves and a spiral tendril, drawn as a tattoo design in fine line shading.

Flower and vine tattoo design sketch

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a vertical flower design with a large five-petal bloom at the centre, a smaller bud at the top, and curling leaves along the stem. A spiral tendril with hatched, ribbed detailing sits at the base, with small dots and circles scattered around the composition. The linework is black and grey with soft pencil shading, and the image has no colour.

Botanical Fine line Flower Vine Leaves Bud Spiral Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bloom had pushed up through the floorboards of room four again, right where the bath pipe came through, and by the time you had found the bread knife to cut it free, its five petals were wider than a saucer. Mrs Pargeter swore it was the damp. The lodgers swore it was the sea, which had been tickling the cliff under the house since the spring tides.

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You had come to Gull Terrace in September to write letters for a retired ferryman who could no longer hold a pen, and you had stayed because the rent was a shilling a week and the back bedroom looked straight out over the bay. Every morning the vine had climbed another loop up the wallpaper, curling over the brass coat hooks, and every morning there were beads of salt water caught in the spiral of its tendril, as though something below had been breathing through it all night.

On the last evening of the month the tendril unrolled itself across the landing like a ribbed green rope, and you followed it down the back stairs to the cellar, where the tide had seeped under the door. A pale bud the size of a thumb turned slowly in the black water. As you watched, it opened, one petal, then another, until the bloom sat on the surface with a ring of small bubbles drifting up around it like someone counting under their breath.

In the morning you pressed the flower flat between two pages of the ferryman's last letter, sealed it, and wrote Mrs Pargeter's name on the front. The house would need someone to explain it, and you were the only lodger who had stopped asking why.