Black ink drawing of four stacked flowers joined by a thin vertical line and dots, shown as a tattoo design on grey paper.

Four stacked flowers on a vertical line

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A pen drawing on grey textured paper shows four small flowers, each with open petals, stacked vertically along a fine central line. Small dots sit between the flowers and above and below the stack. The petals are outlined with fine linework and partly shaded with dark stippled marks, and the design is entirely black ink with no colour.

Botanical Fine line Dotwork Flower Petal Dot Line Design

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tamsin had strung the line across the back kitchen the winter the Marguerite went out past the Skerries and did not come back on the tide. Her mother said the sea kept what it wanted and a thread would not change that. Tamsin said nothing and went down to the rocks at first light with a needle and a spool of waxed twine.

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Each morning she walked the cliff path to the bay and pressed one flower from the hedge between two slates in her apron pocket. Campion first, then thrift, then a pink wild rose gone brown at the edges. When the wind came off the water she tied them in order along the twine, with a knot between each, and at the end of every week she tied a small black bead so she would not lose count. Her mother stopped scolding by the second month. The neighbours said the girl was touched. The baker's boy said she was only keeping a tally of the gulls.

In the spring of the fourth month, a man came up the path with a sack on his shoulder and no boat behind him. He was thin and sunburnt, and he asked for the Penhallow girl. He had been put ashore at a fishing port in Brittany with a fever, and had walked home along the coast, counting harbours.

Tamsin took him to the kitchen and showed him the line. He touched the last flower, still soft, and laughed until he coughed. "You kept it?" he said. She said she had only kept what the sea had not taken, and that was enough to be going on with. The line still hangs there, the beads and blossoms running down towards the floor, and nobody has cut it down.