Black and grey pencil drawing of two dahlia flowers on long stems with serrated leaves, in a botanical style suited to a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two dahlias on stems, pencil drawing

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows two dahlia-like flowers on branching stems, with one bloom higher and slightly behind the other, and serrated leaves along the lower stem. The petals are built up with soft graphite shading and fine hatched lines to suggest depth and volume. The image is in greyscale on a plain off-white background, with the subject centred and filling most of the frame.

Botanical Dahlia Flower Leaves Stem Bloom

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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 name badge on the trestle table says DAVID HOLLIS in capitals someone has gone over twice with a marker, and you stand looking at it longer than is polite. The boy who wore that name used to draw flowers in the margins of his maths book while Mr Pryce wrote quadratics on the board. Nobody else in 4B remembers that. You do, because you sat next to him.

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Marion Pike finds you by the squash jug. She runs a garden centre in Shipley now and still wears her reading glasses on a cord, and she has a cardboard tube under one arm. 'You owe me one,' she says, and slides out a sheet of cartridge paper, soft at the corners. Two dahlias lean on their stems, one higher and set back, with serrated leaves climbing the lower stalk. Every petal is built up in grey pencil with small hatched strokes like fish scales. Your initials sit in the bottom corner, small and crooked, the way a boy signs work he has been told to sign.

'Your gran's allotment,' you say, and Marion nods. The council dug the plots over the spring after you left, but she kept the drawing taped above her sink for thirty years. She never gave it back, she says, because she was waiting for someone to notice that the upper bloom was shaded from the wrong side of the light.

You turn the paper over. On the back, in blue biro, is the sum you got wrong in the test that week, and the reason you copied the flowers instead of the working out. You laugh, and the hall carries on around you. You fold the drawing once and put it inside your jacket, where it stays for the rest of the night.