Green four-leaf clover tattoo with black outlined swirling stems on skin, shaded in two tones of green.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Four-leaf clover with swirling stems

Colour · Photo

A four-leaf clover in shaded green ink sits at the centre of the image, with black linework forming curling stems and tendrils above, to the right, and below it. The leaves are filled with darker green shading along their edges and a black central vein, giving them some depth. The design is centred on a plain, lightly lit area of skin with no other features visible.

Clover Swirl Tendril Vine Leaf

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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

Sit closer, the lot of you, because the canvas is leaking and I have only the one good sentence left in me tonight. Old Harrow's Travelling Marvels had seventeen wagons once. By the spring I am telling you about, there were four, a tent with more patches than roof, and a lion that had long since given up on being dangerous.

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The wire-walker was Nell Tabor, and she carried a four-leaf clover pressed flat inside her ledger. She found it in wet grass outside Muckleby, the morning the bank's man came up the lane with his papers. She swore it kept her feet true on the wire. Every night she climbed to the platform in her faded blue tights and walked the rope as if the ground had never been invented, and every night the bank's man counted the empty benches and wrote something small in his book.

On the last night only three farmers and a dog came to the flap. Nell went up anyway. Halfway across, a gust tore through the seams and the ledger slid from her apron. The clover fluttered down into the sawdust, and Ambrose, the boy who swept the ring, picked it up and held it to the lamp. He did not climb. He simply walked the length of the ring with the clover held out in front of him, step after careful step, and the dog followed him the whole way round.

So that is why the clover is painted on the side of the last wagon, green as a bruise and twice as stubborn. Nobody remembers the takings. They remember the boy and the dog, and how the sawdust did not so much as shift beneath them.