Black ink tattoo of a heart filled with a lace pattern and floral motifs, shown on a patch of skin.

Black lace heart with flowers

Blackwork · Black and grey · Photo

A heart outline is filled with a honeycomb-like lace pattern, with a large rosette bloom on the left, a smaller flower on the upper right and sprigs of leaves extending outward. The linework is fine and even, with the lace areas built from dense small mesh and the petals and scrollwork outlined in heavier black lines. The tattoo is entirely in black ink on pale skin, and it fills the centre of the frame.

Blackwork Botanical Heart Lace Flower Leaves Rosette Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had got into the bobbins again, so Nan spread the lace pillow across the potting bench and told me to hold the pins steady while she worked. Behind us the rhubarb had gone to seed and the sweet peas leaned over their canes like guests who had stayed too long. She never looked at a pattern. She worked by feel, the way she said her mother had, twisting pairs of thread over the pins until a honeycomb of small holes opened under her fingers.

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I asked her what the heart was for. She said the big rosette on the left was her mother's dahlia, the one split from the front bed and carried across two counties in a biscuit tin. The sprigs were for the leaves that came up through the gravel every spring whether anyone wanted them or not. The mesh was just the part that held everything together, she said, and a heart needed a good deal of holding together.

By dusk the lace lay finished on the bench, a dark heart with its frilled edge curling like a wave. Nan rolled it back onto the pillow and pushed the pins into an old tin. 'Your turn next summer,' she said, and I nodded as if I had not already seen how the scrollwork at the bottom was meant to finish.