Black and grey line drawing of a floral bouquet with roses, tulips and leaves, shaded with dotwork, shown as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stippled floral bouquet design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A black and grey drawing of a dense bouquet made up of a large central rose, a tulip at the top, several open flowers and sprigs of leaves and buds. The outlines are fine and even, and the petals and leaves are shaded with stippled dots and short hatching. The bouquet sits centred on a plain white background with no border or lettering.

Botanical Dotwork Flower Rose Tulip Bouquet Leaves Bud Sprig

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last kiln of the season cooled slowly, the way it always did, and Edie Mottram sat on an upturned crate with her brushes wrapped in damp rag, watching the light go grey over the bottle ovens. Tomorrow the works paid its final wages. Tonight there was one tea service left to finish: twelve cups, each with the same bouquet her hand had known for thirty-one years. The big rose, the tulip leaning out over it, the sprigs of leaf spread thin as breath.

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She had stippled the shading on thousands of these. You worked it with the very tip of a sable, a dot here, a dot there, letting the grey gather where the petals folded under. Mr Hollins had once timed her and said she could do a rose in four minutes. She had resented that, because the dots were never quick. Each one had to sit the same distance from its neighbour, or the flower looked diseased.

On the third cup she stopped. The tulip had a petal curled back like a page turned down, and she had painted it that way since 1974 because the pattern book said so. Tonight she added one dot low on the inner curl, where nobody would see it unless they tipped the cup to the lamp. Then another, then a third, a small grey constellation that was not in the book and meant nothing to anyone but her.

Mr Hollins came through at half past nine, keys jangling. He held the cup to the light, turned it, squinted at the tulip for a long moment. 'Lovely,' he said, and set it in the box with the others. In the morning they would go out in straw to shops in Harrogate and Bath, and people would drink from them without ever tipping them to the light. Edie rolled her brush in its rag and switched off the lamp.