Brown ink drawing of a botanical flower design with curling swirls, dots and small stars on a cream background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flower with swirls and dots design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A single flower sits at the centre of the design, with its petals outlined in fine brown linework and shaded in places. Curling swirls and a tapering flourish rise above it, while dots and small stars are scattered along the lower left and right. The design is drawn in sepia-toned ink on a plain cream background.

Botanical Flower Swirl Dot Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mab had the mucking-out half done when the hens set up a racket at the byre door, and she went to see what had got in. Frost lay thick across the yard and the sky over the Fell was the colour of pewter. Nothing had got in. Only the wind, dragging a loose page of the seed catalogue against the gate.

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Her father had kept the seed tins on the top shelf of the apple store, labelled in capitals he believed nobody else could read. She climbed the ladder with the torch in her teeth and found the tin marked LILY, DO NOT EAT. Inside, wrapped in newspaper gone soft as cloth, lay three bulbs, papery and pale, each sprouting a crown of rootlets like the spikes of a star.

She remembered him saying a lily would sulk for a whole winter and then, given one warm week, throw up a stem taller than a man. He had grown them for the flower alone, he said, never for the hens or the market. She set the bulbs on the kitchen windowsill, where the frost ferns crept across the glass in curls, and each morning she counted the beads of condensation gathering on the pane like dots of ink.

By March a green tongue had pushed through the dry skin of the first bulb. She potted it in the old enamel bowl and carried it out to the south wall, where the ground had thawed. The sun came low over the Fell and caught the last frost in the shade of the barn, and she thought, quite foolishly, that the whole yard had been waiting for someone to notice it. She knelt in the mud and pressed the bulb in with her thumbs.