Black lace-patterned flower and trailing vine tattoo running down the side of a torso over the ribs, in a botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black lace flower and vine on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a large flower with a lace-like, openwork pattern at the top, a curling stem, and a smaller leaf-like bloom lower down, ending in a scrolling tendril near the hip. The linework is bold and dense, with the lace texture built from fine black lines and dots. The design is entirely black ink on pale skin, and it follows the curve of the side of the body from the upper ribs to the hip.

Botanical Ribs Lace Flower Vine Leaves Tendril

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 still and mind that cup, because this is the part where the bobbins start clacking. My great-aunt Edie Prow worked the pillow in Honiton before the mill came up the valley, and one winter she set herself a vine in black silk thread, the sort you'd only use for mourning gloves. She pinned it to the board every night after the supper things were cleared, and every morning it had grown another inch towards the window.

Keep reading

There was a lad called Frank Dobbin who danced at the Coronation Hall every Saturday and trod on everybody's toes, but he had a way of holding a girl's hand as if it were thread he might snap. He saw the flower on her board, the big open bloom with its holes like frost on a pane, and he asked her for it. She said he could have it when it was finished. He said he would wait. Edie had never in her life waited on anybody, and that, I always think, was the start of the trouble.

She worked on through three winters. The flower came out fine, all petals and little sprigged dots, and then the stem came down the page in curls, and the leaves grew out of it like hands opening. But she never bound off the last tendril. Each time she reached the end she unpicked a stitch and let it run on, because a finished thing goes in a drawer and an unfinished one stays alive on the pillow.

Frank married a girl from Seaton and died in the spring of his sixtieth year, still asking after the lace. Edie kept the pillow until her eyes gave out, and the vine is still on it, curling off the edge of the board like something reaching for the hall door. Now, what time is it? Right, the band's warming up. Fetch your coat.