Six fine black ink sketches of looping, swirling ornamental designs drawn on grid paper, with two pens resting above them.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Six looping line ornament sketches

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

Six vertical sketches of looping, knotted ornamental lines are drawn in black ink on squared grid paper, each with a small dot at the top. The linework is thin and even, with spirals and loops that vary in height and curl, and the rightmost design is the largest. The image is composed as a row of studies on the paper, with a mechanical pencil and a black fineliner pen lying on a wooden surface above.

Fine line Swirl Ornament Flourish Loop Spiral Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Mags, the sea has gone flat as a slate this week and Mr Pellow has finally let me near the good brushes. He says a flourish is only a sentence that has learned to show off, so every curl I make has to be earned by the line before it. I spent the whole of Tuesday on one stroke for the Ferryman's sign, a tail that rises out of the letter S and loops back on itself three times before it remembers where it was going. Pellow looked at it over his spectacles and said it looked like a kettle flex, then he went out for his pipe and came back and didn't say anything at all, which from him is practically a medal.

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The drawings I've been doing on squared paper at night are my own nonsense, not for any sign. Six little ornaments standing up like candles, each with a dot on the top for the wick. The one on the far right is the biggest and I think the best. It goes down, curls under itself, and comes back up through its own knots like a rope being tied by someone who is thinking about something else. Pellow would say it wastes ink. I think it is the first thing I have drawn that didn't need a reason.

The boat came in on Thursday with a crate of pilchards and a man who asked for my name twice. I told him Ada, and he wrote it on his palm in biro so he wouldn't lose it. I hope the sea keeps him as careful as that. Write back and tell me whether the chapel roof is still leaking over the font, and whether your mother has forgiven the goose.

Yours in ink and salt, Ada