Hand-drawn botanical flower design with spiral tendrils, striped leaves and a small butterfly, shaded in yellow and green with black ink.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stylised flower with spirals and leaves

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

A pen and coloured pencil drawing of a stylised flower with a dotted, curled centre, pointed yellow petals and a stem that curls into spirals. Two striped leaves in green and a small butterfly with yellow and brown wings sit around the stem. Black ink outlines and light yellow and green shading are set against a plain white background.

Botanical Flower Leaf Spiral Butterfly Stem Doodle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Hollis had told Dora twice that the margins of the wages book were not a sketchpad, so Dora waited until the clock above the mangle room struck four and then drew the flower anyway, small, in the blank corner beside March's totals. She gave it a spiral for a stem because the stem kept wanting to turn back on itself, the way the river did below the dye works when the water ran blue. Two striped leaves came next, then a butterfly the colour of weak tea, which she had no right to put anywhere near a page of pounds and shillings.

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Mr Garside found it on the Friday. He held the ledger up to the window like a man checking for forgery and said nothing for so long that Dora began to pack her pencils into the tin with the cracked lid. Then he asked who had taught her to make a stem curl like that. Nobody, she said. It simply came out of the pen when she was bored, and he grunted and turned the page.

Three weeks later a pattern card arrived from a London agent, a printed bloom with pointed yellow petals and a dotted centre that looked very like hers. Garside pinned it to the board beside the looms without a word. Under it, in his square hand, he had written her name and the words for the spring range.

Dora took the card home that night and drew the next flower with its spiral running the other way, so that no one, least of all the agent in London, could mistake which one had come first.