Pencil sketch of a botanical tattoo design with acanthus-style scrolls, chrysanthemums and peonies, shown as a drawing on paper with no body placement visible.

Pencil sketch of floral scrolls and chrysanthemums

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed pencil drawing on paper shows a floral design built from scrolling acanthus leaves, with chrysanthemums and peony-like blooms arranged in a rounded composition. The linework is fine and graduated, with soft pencil shading on the petals and leaves, and the design is drawn in greys only. Two printed reference images of dark and light damask-style florals sit at the top left of the sheet, and a pencil lies across the lower right.

Botanical Chrysanthemum Peony Acanthus Scroll Floral Leaves Sketch Pencil drawing

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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 damask came up from London in brown paper, tied twice with string, which was Mr Aske's way of saying a job mattered. I pinned the two prints to my board by the north window where the light was steady. One dark ground, one pale, both thick with scrolls and blooms. Mr Aske wanted a repeat for the new council houses on Hollins Rise, something a miner's wife could wash down on a Monday without fretting. "Scrolls, Ivy," he said, tapping the print with his pipe. "Something that looks like it cost more than it did."

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I worked through the Thursday with a 2B and a sheet of cartridge, building the acanthus first, the leaves curling back on themselves like the tops of young ferns. My father had grown chrysanthemums on the allotment behind the chapel, bronze and white, and when I reached the big bloom at the heart of the design I found my hand drawing his. I went petal by petal, pressing lightly at the root and letting the lead thin toward the tips the way he had shown me with a bean cane and a bit of string.

On Friday Mr Aske came in with his spectacles pushed up on his forehead and held the sheet against the window. He said the flowers were too fussy for a wall and looked like something you'd lay on a coffin. Would I rub them out? I did. I kept the rubber moving until the grey was clean, and when I handed it back he turned it over, frowned at the blank, and said it would do.

The rolls went to print in March and nobody on Hollins Rise has ever asked about flowers. The drawing still hangs above my bench, pinned at the corners. Rubbed out, but where the lead bit deepest, my father's chrysanthemum shows faintly when the afternoon light comes in low, and I leave it there.