Black line drawing of a botanical flower design with dotwork shading on the petals, flowing stems, leaves and buds, shown as a tattoo design.

Flowers and buds on a sweeping stem

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing of several flowers, including two larger blooms and smaller open flowers, with closed buds scattered along wavy stems and leaves. The linework is fine and even, with stippled dots shading the petals and small dots floating around the composition. The design is shown in black on a white background with no colour, and it is arranged as a tall, S-shaped sweep suited to a long placement.

Fine line Botanical Dotwork Flower Bud Leaf Stem Floral Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chapel wall came down in the wet March of my ninth year, and I was first through the gap with my father's trowel in my fist. Behind the rubble the old mortar had been holding seed all winter, and it had sprouted in the dark: stems as thin as bootlace, feeling their way toward the grey slot of light where the east window used to be.

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The steward from the trust called them weeds and wanted them scraped off the lintels before the coach parties came. My father said nothing. He knelt, pinched the nearest stalk between thumb and nail, and let it go. It sprang back toward the light as if it had been waiting centuries to be asked. My mother pressed a bloom between the pages of the parish register that summer, and the shadow it left is still there if you turn to the burials of 1648.

By August the stems had wound up the bell rope, and the bell, silent since the siege, began to tick in the wind. The steward came up the hill with a ladder and a clipboard of demolition dates. I stood on the third rung and argued with him about the sun, which wanders over a ruin in a way it never does over a church. He gave in because he was tired and the light was gold.

When the autumn gales came they took the rope and most of the leaves, but the top course of the keep stayed green. Last week I climbed up with a flask and sat where the stems curl over the parapet like the edge of a wave. The ledger still lists the keep as condemned. Nobody has cut the stems since, and I have decided to leave them flying.