Black line drawing of a botanical tattoo design with three flowers linked by a curling vine and spiral tendrils, shown on a plain white background.

Three flowers on a swirling vine design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows three open five-petalled flowers with dark centres, joined by a single thin vine that rises from the bottom to the top of the frame. Curled spiral tendrils sit between the flowers and at both ends of the stem. The linework is a consistent black outline with fine interior petal lines, and the design is shown in black ink on white with no shading or colour.

Botanical Flower Vine Swirl Tendril Petal Floral

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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

Sit closer, then, and mind the puddle by your boot, because the gutters on Harrow Lane have never once been honest. Every Thursday in the wet months my grandmother sold winter cabbages from a trestle under the bandstand, and every Thursday a boy came by with a tin of tea he had stolen from the vicarage and a face full of apology. Her name was Ada, and she could make a tenpence coin sing on the stone. The boy was called Tobias Marr, and he could not stop talking about the vine.

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He had a drawing of it folded in his coat, a single thin stem climbing from the cobbles to the sky, three open flowers hung along it like lanterns, and at every bend the stem uncurled into little spirals, tight as a watch spring. He said it was the only thing he owned that wasn't borrowed. Ada asked him what the flowers were for. He said they were for whoever stood at the bottom of the vine and was too proud to climb. She laughed so hard a cabbage rolled into the drain, and that was how they came to be keeping company.

The rain went on for forty years. The stall grew a roof, then a second stall, then a shop with a bell that rang when the door was pushed too hard. Tobias never drew another thing. On the morning of their fortieth spring she found the folded paper in his coat, the flowers gone soft at the creases, and at the very top, in pencil, he had added one more curl, climbing off the edge of the page as if it meant to keep going without him. She pinned it above the till, and it is still there, if you care to look when the rain stops.