Black line drawing of a tulip and lavender bouquet with long tied stems, a botanical tattoo design shown on paper.

Tulip and lavender bouquet line drawing

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a bouquet of three tulips with sprigs of lavender and small leaves, with the stems gathered together and trailing down to the lower right. The linework is black and fairly bold, with fine hatching inside the petals and leaves to suggest form. It is drawn in black ink only on a plain pale background, with no colour.

Botanical Tulip Bouquet Lavender Leaves Flower Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mother Oonagh always said you could smuggle anything across the water so long as you carried it like a wedding gift, and that is how Tomas Brennan came to walk off the Holyhead ferry with a bundle of tulips wrapped in a wet newspaper and held out in front of him like a priest with the sacrament. The customs man at Dover had a face like a closed ledger. He lifted the paper, looked at the flowers, then at Tomas, then at the flowers again. Three of them, fat and pale as lanterns, with the lavender poking up between them like the last of a thin argument. Where are you bringing these, he asked. To a woman who has not spoken to me since Easter, Tomas said. He was let through out of pure pity.

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The lavender was the trouble. Lavender was not allowed, the man said, not without a form, and Tomas had no form, only a spray of dried sprigs his grandmother had pressed into a hymnal in 1961 and which he had pulled out of the same book that morning, thinking it would do the job of a letter. He had sworn to the officer that the sprigs were ornamental. The officer said that was the exact word they all used. Tomas laughed, which he later admitted was a mistake, and the laugh turned into a long story about his grandmother's garden in Wexford, where the tulips had come up in the wrong colours every spring for forty years and nobody had ever minded.

The officer, to be rid of him, took a pencil and drew the bouquet on the back of the declaration form, badly and then not so badly, the stems gathered at the bottom and trailing off like a long dress. He slid it across the counter. This is what you were carrying, he said. Now I have seen it and I can say I did. Tomas folded the drawing into his coat, walked out into the drizzle, and the tulips, unlike the lavender, did not survive the journey, but the picture did, and it is still in the drawer where Oonagh keeps her good scissors.