Hand-drawn botanical tattoo design of pink flowers, leaves and dark scroll swirls on a pale sheet of paper.

Pink flowers and swirls line design

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

A hand-drawn design of three large pink flowers and several smaller blooms, joined by dark scrolling tendrils and small green-grey leaves. The dark outlines are drawn with a consistent line, and the petals are shaded with pink pencil or marker, fading toward the edges. The motif is arranged as a symmetrical cluster on a plain off-white background.

Botanical Flower Leaf Swirl Scroll Dot Bloom

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are bent over the kitchen table with the gas light hissing, the back of an old rent book spread flat under your elbow. The felt pen bleeds into the paper every time you pause, so you work quickly, drawing three big blooms and a scatter of smaller ones. The pink pencil came from Mrs Akers at the infants' school, its point worn to a stub you keep sharpening with a kitchen knife. Outside, the spoil heap behind Hollins Row has gone to bindweed and willowherb since the strike, and the pinks come up in the cinders where nothing should grow.

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The swirls are the hard part. You loop them off the edge of the page the way the tendrils run off the wash-house drain, curling back on themselves until the ink thins to nothing. Upstairs your father coughs, the long rattling cough that means he has not slept, and you hold your breath until it stops. You shade the petals darker at the throat, the way the sky goes over the pit wheel at the end of a shift.

Danny's boots scrape the step a little after six. He comes in grey to the eyes, pulls out a chair, and turns your drawing round with one black finger. He reads it upside down, the way he reads everything, and says the curls look like wheel-ropes winding in. You tell him they are not ropes. They are for him to keep, and he can take them wherever he is sent next.

He folds the page into his shirt pocket with the tally card. By morning the coal dust has got into the crease and the pink has smudged where his thumb pressed, and that smear is the only part of the flowers that ever really took root.