Solid black fleur-de-lis silhouette on a white background, shown as a standalone design with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Solid black fleur-de-lis design

Black and grey · Flash

A solid black fleur-de-lis shape sits centred on a plain white background. The central petal and the two side scrolls have smooth, glossy edges with small highlight cut-outs, and the lower stem tapers to a point. The flat silhouette has no shading or secondary colour, and the design fills most of the frame.

Fleur-de-lis

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The seal had been cut from walnut and bound in brass, and it struck the chart with a sound like a dropped spoon on slate. Hannah Pryce held the paper flat with both palms while Mathieu inked the face of it again, working the black in with his thumb until the lily shape stood out glossy as a beetle's back. Off the Azores the swell ran long and grey under a sky that had not changed colour in four days, and nobody aboard the Clémence had slept properly since Madeira.

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It was Mathieu who had cut the stamp, years back in Nantes, for his uncle's shipping office. Every outward chart carried it, a mark to show where the fresh water was and where the good anchorage lay. Hannah had never trusted it. A lily was a king's flower, Mathieu said, and kings did not care whether a ship came home, so the thing was only ever a promise made on paper. She pressed the seal again beside the cask-stave she used for a ruler and watched the ink bleed a little into the grain.

On the ninth night the stars came out clear for the first time, and the second mate read the sextant wrong on purpose so that they could argue about it. Hannah laughed until she coughed. Then she looked at the chart and saw that the stem of the lily tapered south, exactly as the old Breton pilots had drawn it, pointing back the way they had come.

They put the helm over at dawn. Nobody mentioned the hour lost, and the lily stayed on the chart, fresh and black, pointing at a coast none of them had yet seen.