Black ink line drawing of a symmetrical henna-inspired paisley motif with leaves, scrolls and dots, shown as a tattoo design on white.

Henna-style paisley motif design

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical ornamental design built around a central teardrop shape with a looping inner motif, flanked by leaves, scrolls and dotted petals. A column of small dots and circles rises above the central shape and a scroll finishes it below. The drawing is in fine black outline with hatched leaves and dotwork detail, set against a plain white background.

Fine line Dotwork Paisley Leaf Scroll Dot Teardrop Henna Mandala

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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

The ewes had been brought down from the top field a week early, and Nan Oddie said that was how you knew the snow was coming in properly. She sat at the range with her hands folded over her apron and told the boy the rest while the kettle ticked. Her grandmother had painted the same shape on the back door every spring with a feather and a pot of walnut stain, a teardrop swelling up from a crown of leaves, and every spring the rain took it off again before midsummer. Nobody minded. It was a thing you did, like counting the lambs twice.

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The winter the lane flooded to the gatepost, a man came up it on foot with a pack and a bad cough, asking for work at the lambing. Nan's grandmother gave him the loft over the byre and a bowl of barley. He stayed through the cold, mending the wall by the sheep pens and sitting up nights with the ewes that would not get up. In February he asked to borrow her feather and stain, and she thought he wanted to paint the gate, but he sat on the step and drew curls and dots on the back of his own wrist instead, slow and careful, as if the ink might run.

In the morning the thaw had started and the water in the lane was running brown and fast. The man was gone, the loft empty, the feather left neatly on the windowsill with the stain lid pressed shut. On the back door, above the usual teardrop, someone had added a column of small dots climbing toward the top of the frame, one for each ewe that had lived through the night. Nan's grandmother counted them twice, the way you did, and found she had not been wrong about anything but the number of people who would come back in spring.