Upper arm and shoulder with a black lace-patterned tattoo, pink flower petals and a purple feather, with hanging chains and a small anchor.

Black lace and pink flower on an upper arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A black lace-style pattern with fine scrolls, beads and hanging chains covers the upper arm and shoulder, with a small anchor and a feather hanging from the lower section. Pink and purple petals and a purple feather rise from the top of the design, with soft shading on the colour areas. The tattoo fills most of the frame against a dark background, and the subject's face is not shown.

Upper arm Shoulder Lace Flower Feather Chain Anchor Bead

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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

Mind the third stair, it gives under you like a wet biscuit. Sit there by the radiator, the tea's stewed but it's hot. You want Mrs Ellery's story, do you? Right. She came to Bracken House the spring the herring boats stopped coming past the breakwater, with one trunk and a shawl so black you could have lost a shilling in its folds. Every evening she sat at the end table in the front room with her needle and her cotton, making lace the way her mother had made it on the Hastings sands.

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Not the flimsy stuff. Heavy work, all scrolls and curled leaves like the ironwork on the pier. She hung the finished pieces from the picture rail to dry, and the room looked like a chapel after a funeral. Beads on silk thread. Little chains that caught the lamp. Her husband had been bosun on the Carrick, lost off the Dogger in a blow, and he'd left her a purple feather from a jay that landed on his deck the morning he sailed, and a brass anchor no bigger than a thumbnail. She stitched that anchor into the last piece, where the chains ran out, and said that was where a man's share ended and the sea's began.

The summer after, the peonies came up pink in the back yard and she cut every bloom and pressed them between the pages of the hymnal. Nobody saw her go. In October the trunk was gone from the landing and the shawl was hanging on the hook by the door, folded like a letter nobody had opened. We found the lace still on the picture rail, the anchor turning slow in the draught from the window.

I never took it down. Guests ask me why there's a tangle of black lace in the front room of a respectable house, and I tell them it's a net, for catching the sea's little promises. Then I give them the good chair and a biscuit, and I let them think it's a joke. It isn't, but it does no harm to let people laugh before the tide turns.