Black ink sketch of a fleur-de-lis with loose, scratchy brush strokes on a white background, shown as a design rather than on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sketchy black fleur-de-lis design

Black and grey · Flash

A fleur-de-lis drawn in bold black ink with a central diamond-shaped petal and two curling side scrolls. The linework is loose and feathered, with dense hatched strokes and some solid black areas giving a rough, sketched texture. The design is centred on a plain white background with no colour.

Fleur-de-lis Sketch Abstract

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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

The ink had thickened in the cold, so Hester warmed the pot over the taproom fire and stirred it with the end of a goose quill until it ran again. Outside, the snow had been falling for three days on the Hollin Moor road, and the carrier's cart sat buried to its axles in the yard. Nobody would be leaving until the pass cleared, which meant the letter on the table had to be ready when the first wagon came through.

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It was addressed to the Guild of Lamplighters at Thornbury, and it needed a mark the clerk would recognise. Her father had kept a brass stamp of a lily, the old warden's sign, but it had gone into the river with him in the spring. So she drew the lily instead, fast, the way he had taught her to sketch a hawk in a single breath: one long stroke for the spine, the petals flung wide and left ragged so the ink would not look copied. The centre petal came out like a cut diamond, and she pressed too hard on the left scroll so it bled into the paper.

Owen, the stableman, came in stamping snow from his boots and looked over her shoulder. "That'll never pass for a warden's mark," he said. "It's half smudge."

"Good," said Hester. "Nobody forges a thing that looks this tired. They'll take it for a hand in a hurry." She sealed the fold with red wax, set the inked lily beside it so both would be seen, and watched the black threads feather outward like frost on glass. Beyond the window the wind dropped for the first time in three days, and somewhere in the drifts a bell began to ring the wagon in. She wrote the address, pressed the fold flat, and did not look up until the bell stopped.