Pencil sketch of a flower with flowing swirls, dots and small leaves, drawn as a tattoo design in black and grey shading.

Pencil sketch of a flower with swirls

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a single open flower, shaded in soft graphite with darker tones at its centre and along the petals. Long calligraphic swirls with dotted terminals, and small leaves on thin stems, wrap around the bloom and extend down the composition. The image is black and grey on a plain white background, with the sketch lines and shading left visible.

Botanical Fine line Flower Swirl Leaf Sketch Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The flower came up through the bracken on the morning my father stopped speaking to the Ashby brothers over the boundary wall, which everyone in Sallow Green agreed was a poor reason for anything to bloom. I was nine and sent to fetch the milk from the Pringle farm, and I took the long way along the wood's edge because the path there curled like a dropped ribbon. Where it bent, there was a pale bloom the size of my fist, open as a cupped hand, with a dark heart that looked wet even in the dry August.

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Nobody had planted it. Mrs Tolley, who kept the bees and knew the wood better than the rector, said it was a moonflower that came up wherever someone had buried a promise. She made me dig with a trowel from her apron pocket. We found only a rusted tin of dried peas and a folded sheet with a list of names in pencil, two of which were ours and one of which was hers, crossed through in a neat hand. She put the sheet in her pocket and said that was the end of it, and I believed her for almost a year.

The bloom came back every summer on that bend, always in the same place, always with its curling stems reaching out like the ends of a question. Each autumn it left small dark seeds on tendrils that ended in a dot, and I started collecting them in a matchbox. By the time I was fourteen I had a box full, and I walked them over the stile to the Ashby side, pressing one into every gap in the wall I could find.

The following spring the wall had a breach wide enough for a cart, and on the far side there were seven new blooms in the grass. My father was standing among them with his hat in his hands, and when he saw me he did not say anything at all. He only bent down and touched the nearest one, very gently, the way you might touch a sleeping thing.