Close-up of a woman's hand with a black ornamental filigree band tattooed around the wrist and running onto the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black filigree wrist band tattoo

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up of a woman's lips, chin, shoulder and hand, with a dense black ornamental design wrapped around the wrist and extending up the forearm. The linework is fine and lace-like, with scrolls, dots and openwork panels. The image is shot in warm, low light against a dark background, so the design reads as solid black with no grey shading.

Forearm Hand Filigree Ornament Lace pattern Wrist band Scrollwork Swirl

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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

Mrs Tilly Greave kept the boarding house at the top of Shingle Lane, and every autumn she set her bobbins out on the kitchen table before the lodgers came down for breakfast. The lace she made was black, spun from silk she bought off a Dutch trader who never gave his name, and it was finer than anything the fishing wives on the quay could manage. Nobody asked where the thread came from. They only wanted a band for a wrist or a collar for Sunday, and she charged them a shilling and a kindness.

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The summer the sea came up the steps of the Lantern Hotel, a sailor named Abel Crane came to her door with a sack of wet nets and a debt he could not pay. He had been given a bracelet in a Lisbon harbour, he said, and it had stopped him drowning twice. Tilly looked at the tangle of black ornament on his wrist, the scrolls running up toward the elbow like weed on a rock, and said she would take the debt if he would sit still while she made the lace again around the old pattern.

She worked three nights with the lamp turned low. On the third she tied off the last loop, and the thread had no end, only dots and openwork panels that fell open like windows. Abel went down to the harbour that morning and put his hand in the water, and nothing pulled at him. The debt was struck from her ledger.

Tilly kept the spare bobbin on a nail by the door, where it still turns when the wind comes off the sea.