Pencil sketch of three vertical scrolling leaf and flourish designs on paper, drawn as tattoo flash or stencil references.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three vertical scrollwork and leaf designs

Black and grey · Flash

Three tall, narrow pencil drawings sit side by side on paper, each showing a vine of curling scrolls, leaf shapes and flourishes. The linework is fine and sketched, with some faint construction lines visible behind the main strokes. The image is entirely greyscale graphite on paper, with no colour and no body shown.

Scrollwork Leaf Swirl Vine Flourish Sketch

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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 chalk line is still on the arch when you climb back up the scaffold, and the moor wind has already tried to rub it out. Bring the sheets, Tobias said before he went home with his bad hip. A scroll drawn on paper is only a promise, and you have to draw it three times before the stone will believe you.

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So you pin three lengths of lining paper to the board on the chapel floor, where the roof went years ago and the rain has made a shallow pool under the east window. You trace the vine that climbs the pier at Hollin Priory, the one the Dissolution men left half carved when the money ran out. You rule faint construction lines first, the way Tobias taught you, so the curls can wander without losing their place. The first leaf you draw is too heavy. The second sits right. By the third sheet your hand knows where the vine wants to turn before you do.

What you cannot get down on paper is the damage. Frost has taken the tips off nearly every leaf on the pier, and the scroll nearest the door has worn so smooth that it looks like a river stone. So you draw what the mason must have meant. You give the lost leaf back its lobes, and you let the pencil run past the point where the carving stops.

When the light goes grey, you lay the pencil down. The last curl on the third sheet has run off the edge of the paper and onto the bare floor, the way the real vine runs off the pier and into the grass, as if it means to keep going.