Black line drawing sheet of five tattoo design motifs: a ribbon, a scrolled leaf frame, a single five-petal flower, and two circular floral compositions.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Line drawing of ribbon and floral tattoo designs

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The sheet shows five separate line-art designs on a plain white background: a twisted ribbon inside a scalloped leafy frame, an oval scroll of acanthus-style leaves, a simple five-petal flower, and two round vignettes with scrolling foliage and a flower. The linework is clean and uniform with no shading, so the designs are shown as outlines only. There is no colour, and the layout suggests a flash sheet for reference.

Botanical Ribbon Leaves Flower Scroll Foliage Floral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ribbon will not lie flat, and Mrs Ogunleye is standing at your elbow with a fistful of pearl-headed pins and a view on it. Once more, she says, a half turn to the left, the way her own mother folded the satin on the old church chairs in Peckham. You do it. The silk slides, bunches, and sits again crooked against the scalloped frame of leaves you wired to the chair back at six this morning. Outside the marquee someone is testing the generator, and a dog barks at the noise.

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The leaves are the easy part. You curled the acanthus scrolls over the frame the way the florist taught you, a fern on one side answering a stiff, lacy bloom on the other, and the five-petalled flower you set in the centre looks exactly like the one you cut from the card. The groom's brother arrives in a borrowed waistcoat and asks whether the seats will stay upright. You tell him they will if nobody leans on them, which is true of most things.

Just before eleven the bride comes out to see the chairs for herself. She does not look at the flowers. She runs a thumb along the ribbon where it crosses the frame and says her grandfather tied a knot there, on the good ribbon he kept in a biscuit tin, and she wants it hidden under a leaf. You had not known there was a knot. You find it with your fingertips, a hard little bump under the satin, and you tuck one acanthus leaf over it so neatly that nobody will ever notice it was there.

When the music starts, the ribbon lies flat for the first time all morning. The bride passes it without a glance, which is how you know it was right. Packing up later, you find one pearl pin still warm in your palm, and you slip it into the pocket of your apron, where it stays.