Black line tattoo of a paisley and floral medallion with leaves and dotted accents across the top of a foot, in a botanical style.

Paisley and floral design on top of foot

Botanical · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A symmetrical floral medallion built from paisley shapes, scalloped petals and leaves covers the top of a foot. It is drawn in solid black outline with fine internal hatching and small dot accents, and the ink sits on pale skin with no colour. The design fills the frame centrally, with the toes visible at the top left and the sole edge at the bottom.

Botanical Other Paisley Floral Mandala Leaves Dot Medallion

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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 drawing has been pinned to the bench since Tuesday, and Mrs Ashdown wants her shawl pattern back by Friday, inked clean with no pencil showing through the scallops. You have never liked the dots. Your master says they are where the hand rests, and a pattern without rest in it will make a customer's eye tire. So you sit with the lamp pulled close while the wood goes dark beyond the window, the beech edge where the village ends and the rooks settle like ash from a grate.

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The original hangs in the back room of the print works, folded over a nail, a paisley shawl that came off a ship with a dead man's effects. Its central curl is the thing you cannot get right. Each time the pen runs round it, the line bends too early, as if it knows something about the turn. So you count the leaves instead. Eleven on the outer ring, seven on the inner, nine dots between each petal, the same way you count the beeches along the lane to keep from thinking about what stands behind them.

On Thursday you stop counting and let the hand go. The hatching runs out like the grain in a plank, and when you look up the leaves have become trees, each with a single vein, and the medallion is the clearing seen from the road. The curl points at the gap in the hedge where the path goes in. You feel no fear, only the small satisfaction of a line that has found its place.

Mrs Ashdown holds the sheet to the lamp on Friday and says it is exactly the same. You let her believe it. Only later, when the block is cut and the first print comes off the press, do you notice the whole design has turned a quarter, its curl set towards the wood, as if it were showing someone the way home.