Black and grey shaded design drawing of stars, lilies, a plumeria, rosary beads and a cross, intended as a tattoo design rather than shown on skin.

Stars, lilies and rosary beads flash design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A black and grey drawing of a tattoo design arranged in a vertical panel. It includes several outlined and shaded five-pointed stars, lily and hibiscus-style flowers, a plumeria, a strand of rosary beads and a crucifix, with a small letter M in one star and faint script-like lines at the base. The linework is fine and the shading is soft and realistic, with the elements fading into a white background.

Botanical Realism Star Lily Flower Plumeria Rosary Bead Cross Script

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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

Mrs Tulley wanted a small letter M in the corner of the fete banner, the way her mother had marked good linen, and she wanted it done before the Whitsun fair opened on the green. I was sixteen that summer and sign-wrote for my uncle in Coldwell for a shilling a board, so I took her order at the back of the shop with the turps sharp in my nose and her rosary clicking against the counter as she set it down.

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She had brought a sketch on the back of a seed packet. Lilies down one side, a plumeria like a little yellow fist, and a string of beads running up through them like a line of wet pearls. Stars at the top, five of them, which she said her husband had insisted on for the parish hall ceiling years before the damp got into it. "Make them all sit on the same breath," she said. "Nothing wobbling."

I did the lilies first, with a size-two brush and a bit of grey I mixed myself because the tin shade was too blue. The stars were the hard part. You cannot rush a star with a brush; it wants a steady hand and a bit of nerve, and by the third one my wrist had started to shake. The fourth came out a little crooked, leaning like it had been startled. I nearly scraped it.

She stopped me at the door with two fingers on my sleeve. "Leave that one," she said. "He always said a star is just a hole where the dark lets the light through. Crooked holes let in more."

Then she pinned the banner up on the green, and the letter M sat in the lowest star, small and sure, and when the lamps came on in the hall that night the crooked one caught the light first.