Black lace-pattern tattoo with scrolls, leaves and fine netting running from the neck down the spine and across the lower back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black lace-pattern tattoo across the back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large black lace design with scrolling foliage, leaf shapes and fine netting-like mesh sweeps from the upper back down the spine and across the lower back. The linework is bold and solid in places, with finer dotted and mesh detailing and small shaded areas that give depth. The tattoo is in black ink only against pale skin, and the composition follows the curve of the back.

Blackwork Back Lace Scroll Leaves Foliage Swirl

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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

The frost has got into the pump again, and you have been at the kitchen table since four with the pillow on your knees and forty bobbins clicking like a clock that won't stop. Your grandmother's pattern is pinned to the oilcloth, its corners gone soft from thumbs. Out past the window the yard lamp makes a cone of snow, and the ewes are shouting in the barn for hay that Dad has not yet carried.

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She taught you on this table the winter the Haddows sold the top field. Lace is only a way of keeping your hands honest, she said, and she made you cross pair after pair until the mesh lay even as a net pulled up wet from the beck. Half the parish brought their christening gowns to be mended. She never let you see the money change hands. The buyers in Honiton, she said, can tell a hurried ground by the feel of it, the way a farmer knows a lame ewe before she goes down.

There is a stretch near the middle of the design where a pair of threads has gone missing. You spent an hour on your knees under the table with a torch, and found it in the dog's bed, tangled in a sock. Your hands are slower now. Scrolls keep curling out of the leaves, drops of thread hang where she would have hung them, and you cannot tell any more whether you are copying her or simply finishing what she left.

At dawn you tie off the last pin and sit back. The frost on the window has drawn the same scroll on the outside of the glass, as if somebody out in the field had been working from the same pattern all night.