Back of a person showing a black ink lace-like scrollwork tattoo with flowers and leaves across the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black lace scrollwork across a shoulder blade

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large black ink tattoo of ornate scrolls, floral sprigs, leaves and small dot-like blossoms spreads over the upper back and shoulder blade. The linework is bold and mostly solid black, with finer curling details inside the larger swirls. The image is in black and grey tones against a red wall, with a dark strap visible at the edge of the frame.

Blackwork Botanical Back Shoulder Lace Scrollwork Flower Leaves Swirl Filigree

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lace merchant of Halwick Row had no daughter, so when the rain came in off the estuary she sent her apprentice Mags out to the stalls with a ledger and a cracked umbrella. Mags was twelve and sharp about the edges. She knew that lace was sold by the yard but made by the hour, and that no one bought a hour's work without asking the price of the thread first.

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At the fish market a widow named Orla Penhallow sat under a tarpaulin selling pins. She had a bundle of black silk cord that had gone soft in the wet, and she wanted it turned into something a person could wear. Mags said the lace would take a month. Orla said she had a month, though not much more. So Mags sat on an upturned crate and began to knot, and the rain ran off the tarpaulin in a line between them.

She worked the curls first, the big swirls that turn back on themselves, then filled the gaps with tiny flowers no bigger than a fingernail, five petals each, and leaves with a vein down the middle. When the rain got into her knots she kept on. Orla watched her hands and said nothing, which Mags took as praise.

On the last afternoon the sun came out for the first time in a week, and Orla draped the finished piece across her own shoulder to see how it fell. The merchant's ledger, which Mags had been keeping dry in her coat, recorded the sale as paid in full. Nothing else was written beside it, because there was nothing else to write.