Black linework flash design of an ornate flower with paisley swirls, dotted leaves and a mandala centre, on a white background.

Ornate paisley and mandala flower design

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing of a dense floral composition, built from paisley teardrops, spirals, a central mandala-like rosette and dotted, hatched leaves. The linework is fine and even, with stippled dots and cross-hatching adding shading to the petals and foliage. The design is drawn in black on white with no colour and fills the frame in a roughly symmetrical, vertical arrangement.

Fine line Botanical Flower Paisley Mandala Leaf Spiral Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the third step, it's loose, like everything else in this building. Sit down, the chair with the cushion, the other one has a spring that wants to be somewhere else. You want the story of the flower, and I'll tell it, but you'll have to hush, because the lift has been stuck between six and seven since Tuesday and the whole block listens for it.

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Forty years back my Ronan came up these stairs with a roll of drawing paper under his arm and a tin of Indian ink, and he said the council could keep their tower but they couldn't keep the pattern out of him. He drew paisley teardrops on everything: the back of the rent book, the lid of the bread bin, my wrists when I wouldn't let him near the good paper. Each teardrop curled in on itself like a fern waiting to be let out, and inside every curl he put a smaller curl, until the spiral was too tight for his pen and he'd start again at the edge.

He never finished the big one. It sat on the drawing board by the window for nine winters, a flower the size of a dinner plate with its middle left blank. The spring he went, I sat down with his pen and filled the blank with a rosette of stippled dots, twelve petals, every one a small prayer that the lift would work. Dot, dot, dot, then the hatching on the leaves, and the flower came out whole.

So the flower is finished and the lift is still broken, and I still sit here with a cup going cold, waiting for somebody to come up the stairs with paper under their arm. Oh, there's a knock. That'll be the boy from nine, and he's got his pencil behind his ear the way Ronan used to wear his.