Black outline drawing of a symmetrical ornamental design with scrolls, teardrop shapes and a central motif on a white background, shown as a tattoo design rather than on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Symmetrical scrollwork ornament line drawing

Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical ornamental design drawn in black outline on a white background. Curling scrolls, teardrop and petal shapes, and small dots radiate from a central vertical axis, with a fleur-like motif near the middle and a pointed base at the bottom. The linework is uniform and open, with no shading or fill, so it reads as a stencil or flash design.

Ornament Scrollwork Swirl Teardrop Petal Flourish Dot

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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 stencil was cut from oiled card gone soft as cloth, and Auntie Mairi would not let me throw it out even when damp got into its drawer. Every ceiling on Inish Varra had been done from that sheet, she said, and the island would stand as long as the pattern held. So I was the plasterer now, the last of the line, and it was a Tuesday in March with the wind coming straight off the Atlantic through a gap in the chapel roof.

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I pounced the pattern through the card with chalk dust, working from the middle outwards. First the central stem, a tall tear of petal shapes rising from the axis, then the fleur at its heart, then the scrolls curling out to either side like breath on cold glass. Every swirl had to match its twin across the line. Get one wrong and the whole rose leaned, as the old ones had where a careless hand let a wing drift. The dots came last, small and round, pressed in with a brush handle while the lime was still giving.

On the third morning the lime under the north scroll came away in a flake the size of my palm, and beneath it I found pencil. Names, in a column, each one set under a tiny ringed dot. The first was in a hand I didn't know, the last was Mairi's, and beside hers the lime was blank, waiting. I sat on the scaffold with the wind on my neck and counted them twice, because the sum mattered more than the pattern did.

When the rose was finished I stood under it with the lamp held low, checking the wings, left against right. Then I dipped the finest brush in the pot of grey, set one more dot on the centre line at the top of the stem, and wrote my name beside it in pencil before the plaster could set over it. Nobody would see it but the gulls. It was the only thing in the chapel that wasn't a copy.