Pencil sketch in a sketchbook of a frog surrounded by leaves and flowers arranged in a circle, drawn as a possible botanical tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Frog and foliage in a circular pencil design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn pencil sketch of a frog partly hidden among leaves, blossoms and buds, arranged inside a rough circle. The linework is fine and even, with shading only in light hatching and soft tonal areas on the body and foliage. The design is drawn on white paper in an open sketchbook, with a pencil held at the top left of the frame.

Botanical Fine line Frog Leaves Flower Blossom Bud Circle Sketch

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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

You have been carrying the lidded tin of paint-stained brushes down the harbour steps for ten minutes when the frog hops out from under the drying nets and lands squarely on your boot. Mrs Penrose, who keeps the chandlery and has opinions about everything that crawls, says it has been living in the rain butt behind the fish market since March, and that it will keep until somebody decides what to do with it.

Keep reading

Nobody decides anything in Polwenna. The tide comes in, the boats go out, and the frog takes to sitting on the cracked step of the old lifeboat slipway, half sunk in the wet weed where the bindweed climbs the railings and the pink campion grows out of the mortar. You start bringing it crusts from the bakery. It starts coming when you whistle, which is not the same thing as being tame, Mrs Penrose says, though she leaves a saucer of rainwater on the step all the same.

By August the leaves have thickened over everything. The fishermen cut the wild roses back twice and the frog simply moves to the next clump, as if the whole harbour were a garden it had been sent to tend. On the last evening before the regatta you find it perched on the rim of the bucket where you keep your old sketchbook, looking up at you with the patience of something that has seen a great many people leave.

You close the book, tuck it under your arm and walk to the end of the slipway. The frog does not follow. When you look back it has settled among the blossoms that have spilled over the wall, and from the water-lapped step it looks like part of the flowers themselves, as though the harbour had grown it there on purpose.