Black ink tattoo of a floral lace border curving across the upper arm, with small flower motifs and scalloped edges.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black lace border tattoo on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is a lace-style border with scalloped edges and small five-petalled flowers, drawn in solid black lines that follow the curve of the skin. The linework is bold and even, with open mesh-like areas between the motifs. The image is a close crop in black ink only, with the lace wrapping around a rounded area of the upper body.

Botanical Upper arm Lace Flower Scallop

Find an artist for this

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 you down by the window, love, where the draught can't reach, and mind the chair with the wobble. Forty summers I've told this to lodgers, and not one ever believed the bit about the bobbins, so you may as well start believing now. Mrs Pascoe kept the house on Marine Terrace in Sidmouth, and she had a lace pillow in the back parlour the size of a cartwheel, pins stuck in it like a hedgehog's bristles.

Keep reading

Every winter she made one length of border for the Honiton shop, the old cream-coloured sort. Bobbins clicked all night while the sea grumbled under the cliffs. The summer her son Edwin went out on the mackerel boat and didn't come back in, she stopped sleeping and started working in black thread instead of cream. Nobody asked her why. The lace came out in scallops, each one a little wave curling over, and between them she set flowers with five petals, the sort that grow on the cliff path where the gorse gives out.

She sold no more of it. She pinned the finished length along the stair rail, and it ran round the turn of the landing like a sleeve. Lodgers complained of the dark it made. Then one February the Atlantic came over the wall and the cellar flooded, and Mrs Pascoe, seventy-odd and in her nightgown, went down to the boiler to save the coal. The lace was the only thing she carried back up.

When they took the rail down after, they found she'd worked the last loop round a length of Edwin's sea-cord and tied it off with a bowline, the knot he'd taught her for holding a rope to a drowning man. There, that's the story. You can have the last of the biscuits, and mind you don't tell the landlady where you got them.