Black line flash sheet of paisley shapes, daisy-style flowers and a solid black lotus, with no body placement shown.

Paisley and lotus flash sheet

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A black and white flash sheet of paisley motifs, each filled with concentric circles, dots, zigzag edges or small flower heads. Scattered five-petal flowers and a stylised lotus and lily-like flower fill the page, with a large solid black lotus at the bottom. The linework is bold and even on a plain white background, and the composition is arranged as a loose, balanced grid.

Botanical Paisley Flower Lotus Daisy Floral motif Circle Dot

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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

Sit down before the kettle goes, and mind the cat, she thinks that chair is hers. You asked about the black lotus painted on the landing wall, so I'll tell it the way my mother told me, up on the fourteenth floor of Hallam House in the wet winter of 1962, when the lifts stank and the lights went out every second Tuesday.

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There was a dressmaker on the ninth floor called Iris Pell, who had a sewing machine older than the block and a tin of stencils her husband cut from cardboard in the war. Every shape in that tin was a teardrop with its tail curled over, paisleys, she called them, copied from a shawl a sailor brought home from Bombay. She stencilled them onto pillowcases, the hems of school skirts, the backs of the bin men's gloves. Everyone on the block had a little paisley somewhere about them, and nobody could say who had made the first one.

The trouble came when the council sent a man with a clipboard to say the block was coming down. Iris carried her tin up to the top floor, where the wind came through the broken pane, and she stencilled a lotus onto the bare concrete, petal by petal, with a ring of dots around its heart. The man laughed at her. The next morning the lotus was still there, black as tar, and the wind had dropped to nothing. He went away with his clipboard and left it out of his report, and the block stood another forty years.

So when you walk past those circles and flowers, you're standing on a floor that was held up by a stencil and a bit of cheek. Now drink your tea before it goes cold, and tell me what your mum wrote on the form for the lift repair.