Black ink line drawing of a magnolia branch with several open blooms and buds, shown as a flash design on plain paper.

Magnolia branch line drawing

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a branch carrying four open magnolia flowers and two closed buds, with long curving petals and stamens at the centre of each bloom. The linework is fine and precise, with hatching used within the petals to suggest shading and form. It is drawn in black ink on a pale off-white background, with the composition spread diagonally across the page and no colour.

Botanical Fine line Magnolia Flower Branch Bud Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been coming down on Harrow Street since before dawn, and the stallholders had stopped pretending it would ease. Nell Ardle kept her oilcloth pulled over the onions and watched an old man come up from the bottom of the market with something held under his coat. He had no hat, and water ran off the end of his nose. He set a branch on her counter without asking. Four flowers were open on it, long-petalled and pale as candle wax, with a crown of stamens at the heart of each one. Two buds were still shut.

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"Where does a thing like that grow in this weather?" she asked.

"Up past the quarry, where the wall has fallen down. Nobody cuts it, so nobody sells it." He wiped his face with his sleeve. "I don't want money. Give me a corner out of the wet and a cup of tea, and the branch is yours."

She put him on the upturned crate beside the urn and went back to her onions. The rain kept on. Somewhere around noon, the closed buds began to loosen along their seams, and the open flowers drew their petals back a little further, the way a hand opens when it has been holding something for a long time. The smell of lemon and wet bark spread down the aisle. The fishwife from the next stall came over with an empty basket, bought an onion she did not need, and stood there breathing it in until her husband called her back.

When the rain stopped at dusk, the old man was gone. The crate was dry and the tea cup was upside down on its saucer. The branch lay across her counter with all its petals open, and a third bud had come out where there had been only a green knot before. Nell put it in a jam jar on the windowsill, where it still is. On wet mornings she finds the buds a little further open than she left them, and she has never once sold it.