Black line drawing of an ornate capital letter with a swirled base, a five-petalled flower, small buds and leaves on vines, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement.

Ornate capital letter with flowers and leaves

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a tall ornate capital letter with a decorative serif at the top and a curling base. A five-petalled flower, two buds, drooping leaves and fine trailing vines wrap around the stem, with small dots scattered along the vines. It is rendered in clean black linework on a white background with no shading or colour.

Lettering Botanical Letter Flower Leaves Vine Bud Swirl Filigree

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The customs man at the river crossing could not read the letter, so he asked the girl what it said. She told him it was a name, the first letter of her grandmother's, and that the flower pressed into its stem came from the orchard on the far side of the hills. He held the sheet to his lamp. Ink ran down the stroke like a vine, and small dots fell from it as if rain had started and stopped before it reached the ground.

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The old people in that valley said a letter drawn by a hand that loved what it spelled could cross any line, so long as the carrier did not look back to see whether it still followed. The official was not old and did not believe such things, but he had a daughter of his own. He sighed and stamped the corner without reading further. "Go on, then," he said. "Mind the bridge. It sings in the wind."

The girl walked the planks with the folded paper against her ribs. Halfway over, the boards began to hum, low and sweet, and her coat grew warm where the letter lay. She kept her eyes on the far bank and did not turn, though she felt the vine under her coat curl tighter, the way a cat settles against a sleeper's legs.

The far bank was damp and bright with windfall. A woman in a blue apron stood at the gate with flour to her elbows. The girl unfolded the sheet and held it up, and the flower in the stem had opened its five petals, pale as the dust on a moth's wing. "Well," said her grandmother, "you took your time."