Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Symmetrical tulip and stem design

Black and grey · Flash

A black outline drawing of three tulip-like flowers, with two mirrored at the top and one centred at the bottom, joined by sinuous stems and leaves. The linework is even and uniform, with no shading or fill. The design sits on a plain white background, with a small page number in the bottom right corner.

Tulip Flower Stem Leaf Symmetrical design

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm has the drawing book open on the lectern before you have finished wiping the ink from your fingers, and he is already tapping the page with his thumbnail. "Mirror it," he says. "Left to right, exactly. If the stems drift by the width of a hair, the whole window will lean like a drunk at vespers."

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You have been at St Oswy's for eleven weeks, long enough to know the tulips are not really tulips. Anselm calls them lilies when the prior is listening and something less polite in Latin when he is not. The pattern came north in a crate of vellum, he says, from a city where glassmakers drew flowers that curled like a question, and the brothers who first traced them cared less for petals than for the one unbroken line that runs from the root of each stem to the curl at its tip.

So you work through the morning with a fine nib and a ruler you are not supposed to own. The top left bloom takes four attempts. On the third, you hold your breath through the long sweep of the stem and let the ink run out at exactly the point where the leaf begins. When you lift the pen, the right-hand flower is already there in your head, waiting to answer it, and for once your hand does not shake.

Anselm reads the sheet without a word, then turns it over and writes a small number in the lower corner, the way he numbers everything he has decided is finished. "Eleven," he says, and that is all the praise you get. Outside, the bell goes for none, and the glazier is already at the door with his hands out for the cartoon.