Black line drawing of a fleur-de-lis with the words New Orleans written in script across its centre, shown as a flash design with no body placement.

New Orleans fleur-de-lis line design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A bold black outline drawing of a fleur-de-lis with three pointed petals and a looped centre band. The words New Orleans are written in flowing handwritten script across the middle of the motif. The image is flat black linework on a white background with no shading or colour.

Lettering Fleur-de-lis Script Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Ambrose Tessier kept his forge behind a shuttered bakery off Dauphine Street, and he would not let his apprentice, a thin boy called Lucien, touch the lilies until the bars were straight. Three winters of flat iron went by before he was allowed to bend a petal. The first one came out lopsided, like a heron with one wing shorter than the other, and Ambrose hung it on a nail by the door as a reminder.

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The morning Madame Vidrine came asking for a gate to keep her courtyard shut against the river damp, the old man set Lucien to the work anyway. "Make the centre a loop," Ambrose said, "so the word can run through it." Lucien took the name from a scrap of paper in the widow's hand and welded the letters across the middle, n-e-w and o-r-l-e-a-n-s, so the name ran through the flower like a ribbon through a buttonhole.

The gate hung on its hinges for forty years. Children traced the cold letters with their fingers on the way to school, and the river boats sounded their horns below the levee while the courtyard stayed green and quiet. Nobody asked who had made it, and Lucien never said. He went back to the forge the week the gate went up, and each evening he banked the coals and hammered one more petal into the dark, though nobody had ordered them.

When Madame Vidrine died, her nephew came to clear the house and found the courtyard gate standing wide to the street, its latch lifted clean off. Nobody had seen who opened it. On the cobbles beneath the letters lay a single iron petal, the smallest of all, still ringing faintly as the morning sun struck it, and the name across the flower caught the light like a word being called up the street.