Black ink drawing of a symmetrical floral paisley design with leaves and dotted details, drawn on white paper beside two black fine liner pens.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ink drawing of a floral paisley tattoo design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A vertical design of a central flower with curling petals, paisley-shaped motifs, leaves and small dots, drawn in black ink. The linework is fine and even, with the pattern filled in by hatched and stippled detail, and the drawing sits on white paper beside two fine liner pens. It is a single-colour black drawing with no body part visible.

Botanical Flower Paisley Leaves Ornament Dot Design

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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 summer my aunt Maud took on the lace order from the big house at Harrowby, I was thirteen and put in charge of the pattern sheets, which meant tracing. She had a box of old Persian shawls sent up from the market in Leeds, and every one of them had a flower in the middle like a cabbage rose that had decided to think about things, with petals that curled back on themselves until you could not find where one began. I traced them with a hard pencil and a sheet of greaseproof, and my hand got the rhythm of it before my head did. Dots first, then the leaves, then the long teardrop shapes that the old weavers called paisley after a Scottish town that had copied them from somewhere else.

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Maud did not hold with fancy talk. She said the pattern was a kind of arithmetic that happened to be beautiful, and that if you counted the loops you would never go wrong. I counted. I counted all through the August heat with the window propped on a tin of Bovril, and by the end of the month I could draw a whole flower from memory, which was a thing I had never told anyone, not even my mother.

The order came back from Harrowby in September, cut to nothing. The housekeeper wrote that the lace was too busy, that Lady Harrowby preferred plain edges. Maud read the letter at the table, folded it neatly into four, and said, "Well, she's wrong about the dots." Then she pushed the sheet of tracings across to me. Under the greaseproof, in my own careful ink, sat a flower that was mine and nobody else's, the petals turned the wrong way on purpose. I kept it. It is pinned above my sewing machine now, and the dots still look like they are moving.