Black line drawing of several vertical flourish designs, each with scrolls, spirals and tapering stems on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swirl and spiral flash sheet

Black and grey · Flash

The image shows a sheet of ten or so vertical tattoo designs drawn in solid black ink on a white background. Each design combines a long tapering stem with curling scrolls, spirals and loose circles, with some strokes thick and others fine. The composition is evenly spaced, with no colour or shading.

Swirl Scroll Spiral Flourish Circle Stem

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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 gilt has gone tacky by the time you reach the third letter of the chemist's name, so you work fast with the lamp hooked to the scaffold and the wind coming up Cable Street off the canal. Walter always said a stem should be pulled in one breath, the brush loaded with enamel thin enough to run from the ferrule like ink from a pen. You drag it down the glass from the cornice to the sill, and it holds.

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Below you the city is doing its night business: a bus sighing at the stop, two lads arguing about a fare, the bakery shutter rattling up for the early shift. You know the spirals by heart now. Start at the dot, let the wrist roll anticlockwise, bring the curl back on itself until the fine line almost touches the thick one. Walter called them ear-hooks and had no patience for anything that wasn't finished in a single pass.

Near four the light in the flat across the road comes on, and a woman in a dressing gown leans out to watch you. She doesn't call down. She just lifts her mug, as if to say the thing is coming up nicely. You lift your brush in answer, and for a while neither of you is in any hurry.

When the sun finds the glass you climb down and stand in the road to look. Ten thin stems rise up the window, each one curling off into loops that go nowhere in particular and somehow complete the word. Walter would have called it too showy. You think it is exactly enough. You wipe the brush, wrap it in its oiled rag, and go to find breakfast before the chemist opens.