Black lace-style ornament with hanging chains, an anchor and a feather, with pink and purple flower details, on the upper arm and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black lace and pink flower on upper arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A black lace-patterned ornament hangs down the upper arm from the shoulder, with dangling chains, a small anchor and a feather. Solid black ink forms the lace and the chain linework, while pink and purple shading fills the flower and feather at the top. The subject is shown in a close side view against a dark background.

Blackwork Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Lace Chain Anchor Feather Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bobbins had been clicking for three hours before Nell noticed the tide had turned. Gulls had gone quiet over the harbour wall and the lamp was smoking, but she kept her hands moving across the pillow, forty pairs of bobbins swinging from the pattern like links in a chain she could not put down. Her mother had taught her to count the twists aloud, so she counted, and the numbers kept her from listening for boots on the cobbles.

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Tom had sailed on the Mary Ann before first light. At the door he had promised her a feather from the first gannet he saw off the Lizard, something to pin on her good collar for chapel, and she had told him that men who promised feathers were men who came home late. He had laughed. She had not laughed, but she had left a gap in the pattern the exact width of a feather, a small open diamond where the net showed through like water.

Near midnight the wind swung south-west and rattled the shutters. Mrs Pascoe from next door came in without knocking, shawl over her head, and said the Mary Ann had put back into Newlyn with a fouled rope and no men lost. Nell nodded and kept working. She did not trust her voice yet, so she tied off the last thread and worked the small anchor she had pricked onto the end of the border, black and solid, where the lace met the chain.

Only then did she take the feather from her apron pocket, grey and salt-stiff. He had not seen a gannet at all, she knew it from the way it had been wrapped in newspaper, bought off some boy on the quay for a penny. She pinned it into the gap, where it fit exactly.