White line drawing sheet of paisley and flower designs in a henna-inspired style on a pale blue background, with no body placement shown.

Paisley and floral henna-style flash sheet

Botanical · Colour · Flash

A flash sheet showing a large central flower with paisley swirls and several smaller vertical paisley and floral motifs arranged around it. The linework is fine and white, with dense hatching, dotted detail and curling scrolls filling the petals and leaves. The pale blue background gives the sheet a cool, two-tone composition with the designs spaced across the page.

Botanical Paisley Flower Leaf Swirl Mandala Scroll Henna

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are nineteen days out from Bombay with a tin of henna paste wedged between a coil of rope and the ship's biscuit, and the second mate has already asked twice what it is for. Your aunt pressed the tin into your hand on the quay at Apollo Bunder, folded a sheet of blue paper around it, and told you the designs were older than the steamship line that employed her husband. Nobody aboard the Carrick Star knows that you have spent every night since copying them by lamplight.

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The sea lies flat for a week off Aden, and the water has the same cool blue as the paper. You sit on the forward hatch with the paste in a tin cup and draw with a splinter of bamboo: a flower first, its petals opening like a lamp turned up, then the scrolls that curl off it the way the wake curls when the helmsman brings her round. The bosun watches and says nothing. On the fourth evening he asks for a flower and a leaf on his forearm, so his mother can see where he has been. You make the leaf fat and sharp, the way your aunt drew them.

Off the Cape the swell comes up and the paste cracks in the galley heat. You lose the first flower to the wind. The second you make smaller, with dots for the hatching, and it stays put. By Madeira you have run out of blue paper and started on the back of the ship's manifest, and by Lisbon the crew has passed the tin from hand to hand so often that the lid will no longer close.

At the Humber the bosun pushes up his sleeve, and the design has dried to the colour of rust. Your aunt's paper has gone soft as cloth. You fold it once more and keep it inside your shirt, and you think of the sheet back in Bombay, all those white lines on the blue, and how a voyage is only the long way round to a pattern you already knew.