Black ink drawing of a rosemary sprig inside a dotted circle on a sketchbook page, in a botanical fine line style, beside a carved stone figure.

Rosemary sprig sketch with dotted circle

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A single rosemary sprig is drawn in black ink on white sketchbook paper, with narrow needle-like leaves arranged along a thin, slightly curved stem. A loose circle of small dots surrounds the upper part of the sprig, and a carved stone relief sits at the left edge of the frame. The linework is clean and even, with no shading, and the composition is centred on the sprig with plenty of empty paper around it.

Botanical Fine line Sprig Herb Leaves Dotted circle Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The customs lintel had been lying in Mrs Tregenza's yard since the spring gales, its lion face worn to a soft grin by two centuries of salt. Nobody wanted it. I offered her a shilling for the stone and she laughed and said I could have it for nothing if I took the rosemary too, which grew out of a crack in the wall behind the privy and had never once been watered.

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She sent me home with a cutting wrapped in a wet tea towel. 'Rosemary for remembrance,' she said, 'and it wants leaving alone, mind. Same as the sea.' I pinned the sprig above my drawing board and tried to draw it, but every time the stem came right the leaves went wrong, too thin, too many, crowding together like a fist. So I ringed the top of it with dots, the way my father used to mark the high tide on the harbour wall, and stopped fussing with it.

Her son came for the lintel the week after the funeral. He stood in the yard turning the stone over, hunting for a name cut into the back, and found only the scratches where the lion's paws had chipped. He asked whether I had taken anything from the garden. I said no, which was half true. The cutting was in a jam jar on my windowsill, rooting slowly, the way things do when nobody is hurrying them.

By October it had three pale threads of root and a green shoot no bigger than a pin. I took the drawing down and looked at the dotted ring for a long time, then wrote underneath it in pencil: keep it dry, keep it small, let it take.