Black and grey pencil drawing of an ornate chandelier with roses, snakes, chains and crystal drops, shown as a fine line tattoo design.

Ornate chandelier with roses and snakes

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed drawing of an ornate chandelier with candle arms, a cage-like central frame and two roses rising from the top. Snakes coil through the arms and frame, and strands of beads, chains, crystal teardrops and tassels hang from the base, with a small bird perched among the chains. The fine shading is done in pencil on a plain white background, with no colour.

Fine line Botanical Rose Snake Chain Crystal Tassel Bird Candle Bead

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chandelier was the only thing left in flat 14C when the council sent me up to clear it. Everything else had gone: the fridge, the sofa, the rail of hangers that had held up thirty years of Mrs Keel's coats. But the light still hung from the ceiling rose, its candle arms bent like the necks of swans, and every time the lift shaft groaned through Calder House the crystal drops knocked gently against each other.

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Her son had told me on the phone that she bought it from a hotel being demolished in 1979 and never once switched it on. The wiring was older than the flat. I climbed the stepladder with my screwdriver and found the cage at the top wrapped in brass snakes, their tails knotted round the bars, and roses wired to the frame with the care of someone who expected to be looked at. Halfway down the chains, a little tin bird sat with its beak open, as if it had been mid-song when the bulb went.

I should have unscrewed it and carried it down to the skip. Instead I fitted the one spare bulb in my van and flicked the switch. The candle arms lit with a hard white glow. Shadows of roses crept up the magnolia walls, and through the bare window I could see the car park below, where a boy on a bike had stopped to look up.

He lifted one arm, the way you wave to someone on a stage. I waved back, then went down to the van. When the council rang on Monday to ask whether the flat was empty, I told them it was not quite yet.