Black lace-pattern tattoo with pearl dots and hanging beads across the upper arm and shoulder, in a blackwork style.

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Black lace and pearl shoulder tattoo

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large tattoo of an ornate lace pattern covers the upper arm and shoulder of a person wearing a blue top, with the face not shown. The design uses dense black linework and shading to form scrolls, a honeycomb mesh, and a border of white-dotted pearl strands that end in dangling beaded swags. The image is in black ink and grey tones, with the pale skin and the blue fabric providing contrast around the design.

Blackwork Dotwork Upper arm Shoulder Lace Pearl Bead Scroll Ornament

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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

Sit closer, the gas lamps are going out one by one along Stoney Street, and I'll not shout a story you can hear from the cobbles. This is about Ada Pilkington, who worked a Leavers machine in the top room of a warehouse off Broad Street, and who could hear the lace before it was finished. Her hands never stopped. The machine clattered like a rookery at dusk, and she counted stitches under her breath until the pattern rose through the mesh like weather through a window.

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The mill owner's son wanted a collar for his bride, something dense enough to hide the bride's nerves. Ada refused him three times. On the fourth night she sat up with a lamp, a spool of black silk, and a string of seed pearls her mother had sewn into her own bodice on the day she was married. She worked the scrolls first, fat curls that spread like ferns after rain, then the honeycomb mesh that a careless eye would take for shadow. Last of all she hung the pearls in long swags, each one ending in a bead like a dropped tear.

The bridegroom never got his collar. Ada sold it to a woman who came up the stairs in a grey coat and paid in coins that rang. The pattern lives on in the Lace Market still, if you know where to look for it. And when the wind comes off the Trent, you can hear the pearls knocking together, counting, the way she did.