Black and grey drawing of an ornate lettering tattoo design surrounded by leaves, flowers and ribbons, with no body placement shown.

Ornate botanical lettering design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed black and grey drawing of stylised lettering set within a dense mass of grasses, leaves and flowers. Fine hatching and stippling model the letterforms, with scrolls, a daisy-like bloom and two ribbon banners at the lower edge. The composition is centred on a white background with no skin or body visible.

Lettering Botanical Lettering Foliage Leaves Flower Ribbon Daisy Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody at Harrowgate Nursery believed the lettering would take, least of all Mr Pell, who had spent thirty years grafting roses and considered anything with a serif a vanity. But the banner had to be spelled out before the frost, so the three of us knelt in the wet bed at dawn with a tin of tacks and a ball of grey twine, pinning the capitals out in couch grass and yarrow until they stood up like a word.

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The daisy was my doing. I had found it wedged under the greenhouse step, a bloom that had no business surviving November, and I kept it in a jam jar on the potting bench while the letters were drawn. Pell said flowers were for funerals. Ruth said it was for luck, then laughed at herself for saying so, which was how I knew she meant it.

By the time the ribbons were tied along the bottom, the whole thing had gone shaggy and wild, the way a hedge does when nobody has the heart to cut it. Pell walked round it twice with his hands behind his back and said nothing at all, which from him was a standing ovation.

The next spring the grass came through the twine and the capitals were green, not stone, and the daisy had gone to seed in its jar. I still keep a pinch of it in an envelope. Pell's ledger lists the bed as Lettering, unfinished, which is the most honest entry he ever made.