Black line drawing of a flower bud on a curling vine with spiral tendrils, a botanical tattoo design shown on a plain white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swirling vine with a flower bud

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a stylised flower bud with pointed petals at the top of a vine that rises from the bottom of the frame. Several spiral tendrils curl along the stem, and a larger curl sits near the top right. The linework is thin, even and unshaded, in black on a plain white background.

Botanical Fine line Flower Bud Vine Swirl Spiral Tendril 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

Dear Ysolde, the abbot has finally let me have the good vellum for the Easter gospel, though he watches my ink as if it might climb off the page. You will laugh, but I have been drawing the same vine for three weeks. It starts at the bottom margin, the way the old rose by the cloister wall starts at the flagstones, and it winds upward without asking leave of anyone. Brother Anselm says a border should be a fence for the eye. Mine refuses to be a fence.

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Yesterday I finally got the bud right. I had been drawing it closed, tight as a fist, and it looked like a mistake. Then I remembered the rose after the hard frost, when one bud had split its sepals and was only just deciding to be a flower. I gave it a few pointed petals, leaned it toward the margin where the morning light comes through the high window, and let the tendrils curl round it like novices gathering to see something.

Brother Anselm came with his lamp and said nothing for a long while. Then he took my pen, dipped it, and added one more spiral at the top right, larger than the rest, looping out past the edge of the text where no reader would ever look for it. "Every page needs one thing that doesn't belong to the rule," he said, and handed the pen back.

I have not told him that his curl is the best thing on the sheet, and I will not tell him. Pray for my hand, and for the book to be finished before the swallows come back.