Four black line drawings on tracing paper showing a moth, a scrolling mandala, a fleur-de-lis spire and a half mandala, all designs for tattoos.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Four ornate tattoo design drawings on tracing paper

Black and grey · Flash

A four-panel collage of black ink line drawings on tracing paper. The top left panel shows a moth with patterned wings beside a black fineliner pen, and the other panels show ornate mandala-style designs with scrolls, dots and a fleur-de-lis finial. All designs are drawn in fine, even linework with no shading or colour.

Moth Mandala Fleur-de-lis Scroll Ornament Stencil

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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

By the third week of August the Bramley trees were so heavy their branches touched the grass, and the wasps had found the windfalls. I worked in the potting shed with the door propped open, a roll of tracing paper weighted with a jam jar at one corner. The moth I was copying had come to the kitchen window the night before and stayed there all morning, so I took it in a tumbler and let it settle on the bench while I went over its eyespots with a fineliner.

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Aunt Dot taught me that a scroll should look like it is growing rather than drawn. She kept a biscuit tin of rubbings from the ironwork on the old railway halt, and the fleur-de-lis finial on my third sheet came from the gate there, the one with the rust flower at the top that we were forbidden to climb. "Keep your hand loose," she used to say, "or the lines go dead on you." Her mandalas were built from the middle outwards, one ring of dots at a time, and I found I could not start anywhere else.

The lad who wanted the moth was twenty and had never sat still for more than an hour, so I drew it with the wings open wide enough to wrap a forearm. When I rolled the sheets up that evening, the lamp was already drawing in moths from the orchard, dozens of them knocking against the glass, and I thought how a design is only a way of asking something to stay put for a while.

I pinned the four drawings to the rafter beside Dot's old ones. In the last light the ink looked wet, as though the pen had only just lifted, and the moth seemed to be deciding whether to land or go on.