Black ink drawing of the word free in cursive script inside a circle wrapped with fine line leaves and vines, shown as a tattoo design on white paper.

Free script inside a vine wreath

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A hand drawn tattoo design showing the word free in flowing cursive script at the centre of a single thin black circle. Small leaves on delicate stems wrap around the lower left and upper right sections of the circle, with a few sprigs extending outward. The lines are crisp and even, drawn in black ink on a plain white background with no shading or colour.

Fine line Lettering Botanical Free Script Circle Wreath Vine Leaves Wording

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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

Mr Pell brought the wreath in on a Tuesday, still smelling of the van, and asked me to write the word in the middle. His own hand, he said, looked like a crab had walked across the page. Mine had been trained on shop fronts along Harbour Row for twenty-two years, and I can make a curl of a letter sit as neatly as a gull on a bollard. So I took my fine nib, the black ink and the steel ruler, and set to work.

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The circle was the hard part. Whoever drew it had kept the line thin and even, and the vines crept round the lower left and the top right as if they had somewhere else to be. My father used to say a vine never fights its ring. It just keeps growing, and one day the ring is only a rumour under the leaves. I didn't tell Mr Pell that. I told him the ink would hold, and it did, though I lifted the pen a little early on the final e and left a hairline gap that only I would ever notice.

Three weeks later a postcard came from Scarborough in a girl's careless capitals. The wreath hung above her kitchen sink, she wrote, and she had stopped seeing the circle at all. She only saw the word sitting in the middle of all that green, with the sea light coming through the window and making the ink look wet. The little sprigs at the edges had begun to lift, she said, as though they meant to climb off the paper and go looking for the water.

I pinned the postcard above my bench, beside the ruler. Some mornings I still look at it before I start a new shop name, and think about how little a word needs to hold the middle of a circle, so long as the edges are allowed to wander.