Black outline drawing of two open blossoms with dotted stamens, leaves and small flowers, a botanical design that could work as tattoo flash.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Line drawing of two flowers with leaves

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows two large five-petalled flowers with dotted stamens around a central circle, joined by several pointed leaves with vein details. Two small five-petalled flowers and thin curved stems fill the gaps around the main bloom. The drawing uses bold, even black outlines on a plain white background, with no shading or colour.

Botanical Flower Blossom Leaf Petal Stem Stamen

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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 prior wanted the altar frontal finished by Lady Day, and Brother Osric had only managed the outlines before his hands began to shake. I took the pen from him on a grey morning in March and told myself the dots would be the easy part. They were not. Each stamen is a single touch of the nib, lifted cleanly before the ink can spread, and the filaments are so fine that one clumsy breath turns them to smudges. By noon my knuckles ached and I had ruined two sheets of vellum.

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Osric would not let me leave out the small crescent at the heart of each bloom. "The flower wants a light in its middle," he said, and would not explain, though he watched me draw every one. I thought it an old man's fancy until I climbed into the rafters for a fresh pot of gall ink and found his pattern book wedged behind the beams. Beside each drawing he had written a name in a cramped hand, and every name had its own crescent.

They were the brothers who died in the sickness the winter before I came, twenty-three of them, and I had known perhaps six. Osric had been stitching their memorials into the cloth one flower at a time, and had stopped only when he could no longer hold the pen steady enough to finish.

I sat with the book open until the bell for vespers. Then I drew a crescent into the empty heart of the last bloom and, beside it, wrote in my own uneven hand the name of a brother I had never met, sent to the infirmary before anyone thought to pray for him. Osric's lamp had gone out by then, so I finished by candlelight.