A hand sketches a bold black tribal-style design of a five-petal flower, vines and a spiral on white paper with a pencil.

Tribal flower and swirl design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A hand draws a tribal-style design in pencil on white paper, showing a five-petal flower at the top left joined to flowing vine lines. Below, the lines curl into a spiral and taper into pointed leaf shapes, with soft grey shading along the inner curves. The composition runs diagonally across the sheet, and the design is shown in black and grey only.

Botanical Blackwork Flower Vine Swirl Spiral Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Put the kettle on, Dougie, and don't touch the basil, that's the only green thing this tub has left. You want to hear about the sea-pink? Sit down, and mind the coil on the bench. It's the old warp off the Ardnish and it's been sulking since Leith.

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You've got that look, like a lad wanting to go ashore for a flower. Well, my gran told me something when I was your size. A vine on a ship runs wild if nobody watches it. It climbs the rigging and gets into the flour. But tie it round a spindle and keep turning it, round and round, and it grows in a curl instead, tight as a shell, and that curl holds. The leaves come off it sharp as knives because they've been pulled through so much weather.

She drew it for me on the back of a chandler's bill with a carpenter's pencil. A flower at the top, stems going down like two hands clasped, and a spiral in the middle where the wind couldn't get in. She said a flower's no use pressed in a book. It wants a hook to hang from.

I kept that bill thirty years. It went overboard off the Minch in a gale, and the pencil was worn soft by then. Pass me that spoon. The basil's come on nicely, hasn't it, now you've stopped fussing at it.