Pencil line drawing of a magnolia branch with open flowers and closed buds on cream paper, a botanical fine line design sketch.

Magnolia branch line drawing

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a branching stem with three open magnolia blooms, several closed buds and pointed leaves. The outlines are thin, single pencil lines with light detail on the petals and small dots along the stems. The design is shown in grey pencil on a cream background, with the branch running diagonally from the lower left to the upper right.

Botanical Fine line Magnolia Branch Flower Bud Leaf Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Okafor's hall had a sprung floor that gave under your heels like a held breath, and on Saturdays the whole of Ashgrove came up the stairs in its good shoes. I was seventeen and had been sent to fetch the bottle of lemonade from the back room, which is how I came to see Dennis Pryor standing in the yard with a sprig of magnolia in his buttonhole. Nobody grew magnolias in Ashgrove. The tree behind the Co-op had been cut down the spring before, and the stump was still there, pale as bread.

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"Where did you get that?" I asked him.

He turned the branch over in his fingers, the way a man checks a coin. "Off the wall of the vicarage. Mrs Hale said I could have what the frost had taken. Said it was no use to anybody."

We danced to a Glenn Miller record that night, the gramophone wheezing between songs, and every time he turned me under his arm the blooms bumped against my cardigan. By the last waltz the petals had gone brown at the edges, but the buds stayed tight and green, as if they were waiting for a better season.

Forty years on I still have that dance card in my drawer with his name on it, and I still think about the stump behind the Co-op, pale and flat, that nobody ever thought to pull out.