Six black ink floral and scroll designs on a white background, with feathered fronds, leaves and curling swirls in a flourish style.

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Six black floral and scroll tattoo designs

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows six separate black floral designs on a plain white background, each made of feathered fronds, leaves, blossoms and curling scrolls. The linework is solid and silhouetted in places, with fine tendrils and spirals drawn in thinner strokes. Everything is rendered in black on white, arranged in a loose grid so each motif can be viewed on its own.

Botanical Flourish Scroll Floral Leaves Fern Swirl Blossom

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The barge Marigold came up the Ouse every spring with its hold full of pots and its roof sprouting ferns the boatwoman had planted in tins. Her name was Hester Vane, and she could not read, but she could tell a scroll from a spiral by the way the bramble went round it. When the lock keeper at Naburn asked why she bothered with weeds on a working boat, she only said the weeds had been there first and she was merely keeping them company.

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One March the ice came early and stuck the Marigold in the reeds below the weir. Hester went ashore with a bucket and an axe to cut a path, and found a cottage where no cottage should be, its door wound round with fronds that looked like the black feathers of a crow's wing. An old man sat inside on a chair made of driftwood. He had no teeth and a great many questions, and he asked her which way the water went when nobody was watching it.

She told him the water went where the leaves went, which was the sea, eventually. He nodded as though she had answered something harder. Then he gave her a tin of cuttings, every one of them curled tight as a fist, and said they would open only when she stopped trying to steer them.

She planted them along the gunwale and forgot about them through the summer locks. By the autumn the whole barge had gone to swirls and blossom, and when she moored at Selby the lock keeper's wife stood on the towpath and cried out that the boat was on fire with leaves. Hester only laughed, and let the water take her where it liked.