Black ink line drawing of a botanical tattoo design with a central lily, blossoms, raspberries, leaves and hanging chains with dotted beads, shown in two panels.

Lily, berry and chain design drawing

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a central lily with leaves above a symmetrical arrangement of flowers, raspberries and leaves that spread out to each side. Thin black outlines are combined with dotted stippling in the petals and beads, and fine chains with hanging drops sweep down beneath the flowers. The image is a black and white sketch with the design repeated in a second, lower panel.

Botanical Dotwork Lily Flower Blossom Leaves Chain Bead Design

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pattern had to repeat exactly, or the machine would drop a stitch and the whole web would tear along the seam. Hester pinned the lily to the top of the sheet first, because the lily could not be moved. Below it she laid the garland of leaves and the two wide flowers, one to each side, then the raspberries, which Dilys kept insisting were too small.

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'They're the right size for a girl's thumb,' Dilys said, and Hester told her to draw them to the scale of the bobbin, not the thumb. The chains came last, dropping in graded swags from the flowers to the bead-drops, each bead a pinprick the punch-card would read as a hole. Hester counted the swags three times. Three was the number her mother had used, and her mother had never explained why.

The order came up from the warehouse on a Thursday: four hundred yards for the chapel bazaar, the lily to face outward on every panel, and a note in a clerk's hand asking whether the raspberries could be dropped. Hester wrote back that the raspberries were the only part of the pattern anyone ever asked about, and that they stayed.

On Friday she carried the master sheet down to the mill floor herself and held it up under the lamp so the first loom could read the lily through the paper. The needles began to turn. Dilys stood at her elbow with her thumb pressed to her mouth, watching the first berry come up out of the lace, small and stubborn and exactly where it had been drawn.