Black ink drawing of a tattoo design featuring a peace sign at the centre, flanked by scrolling swirls, stacked circles above and a teardrop shape below, shown without a body placement.

Peace sign with swirls and drops design

Black and grey · Flash

The design centres on a peace symbol inside a circle, with two looping scroll shapes curling around it. Stacked circles run down from the top, and a teardrop with curled tendrils sits at the base. The linework is bold and black on a pale grey background, with no shading or colour.

Peace sign Swirl Scroll Circle Teardrop Symbol

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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

Nobody in Clayhithe had asked me to paint a peace sign since the summer of 1971, so when Mrs Okonedo rolled her late husband's van into the yard with FLOWERS AND FISH half rubbed off the side, I assumed she wanted the lettering touched up. She wanted the circle restored. Under the grime it was still there, a ring with three spokes, and around it someone had looped two long scrolls like a pair of ears, the paint gone the colour of weak tea.

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I worked on it for three evenings with a number two rigger and a tin of black enamel I had bought years ago and never opened, because the old stock had gone hard. The stacked circles down the top I did last, each one smaller than the last, the way you would count bubbles rising from a pan. Mrs Okonedo sat on an upturned crate and watched. She said very little, except that her husband used to draw the drops himself with his eyes half shut, so they looked like they were falling.

On the fourth morning the teardrop at the base would not sit right. I kept lengthening its tail until it looked like rain caught on the lip of a gutter, and I was ready to call it finished when she asked me to curl the tendrils inward, the way he had done them. I did. Then I stood back and saw it properly for the first time. The scrolls held the circle the way two hands cup a candle in a draught, and the drops ran down towards the ground as if something had been poured out and was still coming.

She paid me in cash and a flask of tea. I drove the van round to the car park by the canal so she could see it in daylight, and the sun caught the black on the door. She didn't cry. She tapped the roof twice, the way you would tap a horse, and said, 'There, now he can go.'