Black and grey drawing of an ornate four-leaf clover with filigree swirls and small clover motifs, shown on white paper.

Ornate four-leaf clover design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A drawn four-leaf clover with a short stem, filled with ornamental swirls, scrolls and small clover shapes. The linework is fine and dense, with stippled shading that gives the leaves depth and contrast against the highlighted lines. The design is in black and grey, centred on a plain white background.

Botanical Clover Swirl Filigree Scroll Leaf Stem

Find an artist for this

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

Sit down, sit, the kettle's on and you'll not get away before I've finished, so stop looking at the door. Now. Old Tomás Keane had a forge at the top of the lane on Carrig, and he made silver the way other men make excuses, slowly and with a great deal of fuss. Every spring he took the ferry to Ballinglen for the good wire, the thin stuff they draw out for the lace makers, and brought it home curled in a biscuit tin.

Keep reading

The brooch he was after was for the priest's sister, who had lost her man to the sea off the north stacks. Tomás wanted a four-leaf clover, but not a plain one. He wanted every leaf full of scrolls, so that you'd find a new curl each time you looked, with a tiny clover tucked into the heart of each one, the way his mother folded the bread dough. He worked nine nights. On the ninth, the wire snapped at the stem and he swore so loudly the gulls went up off the roof.

He sat with it in his palm, and the story goes that a small voice said from the hearth, 'Leave the stem short, Tomás, luck runs out on long roads.' He didn't ask who. He cut it short, stippled the shadows with a nail until his eyes ran, and polished the lines bright enough to catch a candle. He gave it to the priest's sister the next morning, and she pinned it to her coat and walked straight down to the strand, and came back with the tide in her shoes and her face lit like a lamp.

And that's the whole of it. No, don't ask me what she found. The sea keeps what it likes, and the silver went back to the forge in the end, melted down for a ring. But if you're walking the north shore some evening and you see a thread of wire shining in the wrack, leave it be. It's counting.