Dark brown line drawing of an ornate henna-style floral design with paisley swirls, leaves and a central mandala-like flower, on a cream background.

Henna-style paisley and flower design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical-looking floral composition built from a central mandala-like flower, paisley scrolls, pointed leaves and dotted and curled details. The linework is fine and even, with hatched shading in the petals and leaves and no solid fills. The design is shown in a single dark brown ink on a cream background, and it runs diagonally from the upper left down to a curled motif at the bottom.

Botanical Paisley Flower Mandala Leaf Swirl Henna Floral Dot Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer, the lot of you, the candle won't last the whole tale. Brother Osric came to the scriptorium at Saint Ebba's the winter the copyists ran short of ink, and the prior gave him one rule: keep to the margins. So for eleven years he did, and the margins grew wild. Every page of the Psalter put out a flower at its edge, a round mandala blooming in the corner of the Creed, paisley scrolls curling down the side of the Magnificat like smoke off a snuffed wick.

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The prior went down the rows one spring with a lamp and a pumice stone. He held a page to the light and said the leaves all leaned the same way, every petal pointing to the lane where the carters came up from the coast. Osric said the leaves only followed the sun, which was true, and that the stone would take the vellum down to a ghost before it took the ink. He was sent to the cold room to think about it.

That night he took the walnut stain his mother had taught him to mix at the dye-works in Wrenhithe, thinned it with rainwater, and painted one more flower on the blank flyleaf at the back of the book. He worked the hatching in fine even strokes, dotted each petal, and finished with a curl at the bottom that ran off the edge and kept going. By morning the prior had found it, and he sat with the book open on his knees for an hour, tracing the spiral with one finger.

Nobody scraped it. The prior is buried in the north cloister now, and the book sits in a case in the town library with the flyleaf turned to face the wall. Look at the tail of that last flower, though, if you're ever shown it. The curl does not stop at the edge of the page. It goes on, under the stain, toward the coast road, and some mornings the ink is still a little damp.