Sheet of seven hand-drawn black ink border designs with swirls, dots, leaves and vines, with a handwritten note reading to start left to right.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hand-drawn ornamental border designs

Black and grey · Flash

A photographed sheet of paper with seven horizontal strips of hand-drawn ornamental borders in black ink. The strips combine curling scrolls, teardrop shapes, dots, leaf motifs and small floral vines, with a handwritten line of text and arrows along the top. The linework is even and bold on a plain white background, with the designs filling the full width of the frame.

Border Scroll Swirl Dot Leaves Vine Flourish Teardrop Flower Arrow

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Oakley left his pattern book on the bench with the rule written across the top of the first page in square capitals, which I took for a joke until the Tuesday he made me say it back to him. Always start your design left to right. The circus was down to two wagons by then, the big top patched with feed sacks, and the handbills for the Saturday show still had to be lettered by hand because the press in Wolverhampton had stopped answering the telephone.

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So I drew borders. Scrolls for the lion act, teardrops for the trapeze girls, a little vine of flowers for the clowns, who insisted their name go in a flourish. Mr Oakley checked every strip with a pencil held like a cigarette he never lit, and if I started from the right, even by a finger's width, he would tap the paper and say the eye has to travel the way the rope does. He never said which rope.

The Saturday of the last show the rain came in sideways and half the seats stayed empty. We ran the programme anyway. When the lion came out, slow and grey around the muzzle, Mr Oakley stood at the ring gate reading a handbill I had been up until dawn finishing, and his thumb followed my teardrops along the margin, left to right, the way he had taught me.

"Good," he said. That was all. Then he folded the bill into his coat and walked out into the mud, and I did not learn until years later that he had carried it in his pocket until the day he died.