Black line drawing of a calligraphic scroll flourish with interlocking loops and ball terminals on a white background, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement.

Scroll flourish divider design

Black and grey · Flash

A single black ornamental flourish runs horizontally across a plain white background. It is built from interlocking S-shaped loops, a central figure-eight knot and ball-ended scrolls at each side, drawn with bold, solid strokes and no shading. The design is entirely black with no greys or colour, and it is centred with generous white space around it.

Flourish Scroll Swirl Ornament Loop

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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

Sit nearer the stove, the lot of you, and mind the cat, she's had a bad night. Now. You want the story of the Skerrow log, and I'll tell it the way my gran told it to me, which is the only honest way, because she was there and I was not.

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Old Tobias Vane kept the light on Skerrow Point for thirty-one winters, and he could not write a plain word to save his soul. Weather, tides, oil burned, ships sighted, he put them all down in curls and loops, so the inspector from Hull sent the book back twice asking what the devil a man meant by a figure-of-eight with a ball on each end. Tobias just tapped the page and said the sea did not talk in capitals.

Then came the February gale that took the Ellen Marr onto the Gannet Rocks. The keeper's boy, Ned, climbed up with the lamp chimney cracked and no way to keep the wick lit but a bit of copper pipe he'd begged off the smithy. Tobias sat below in the kitchen with the log open and drew one long flourish across the storm page, a rope of loops that wound and crossed and came back on itself. Ned asked him what it was for. Tobias said, it's the way round, boy. Every turn you can see the end of, and the ends are where you hold on.

They had the lamp burning by dawn. The Ellen Marr's crew were three men and a dog, and the dog was the one who swam for the shore. When the inspector came, he found that flourish still on the storm page and read it for a long while, and wrote nothing at all in the margin. That was the only time, my gran said, the Board ever left a page the way it was found.