Tattoo on a shoulder and upper arm of black lace with dangling beads and a small cross, above realistic red roses and gold scrollwork.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black lace shoulder piece with roses

Realism · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

A black lace-patterned design covers the shoulder, with strings of dotted beads hanging down and a small cross at the lower end. On the upper arm, realistic red roses with green leaves sit beside ornate gold and brown scrollwork. The lace is rendered in fine black linework and shading, while the roses use full colour, and the photo is taken from behind with the shoulder and bra strap in frame.

Realism Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Lace Rose Cross Bead Leaf Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The third bobbin snapped on the Tuesday, the day the smacks came in heavy and the gulls grew bold, and Maud Pellow sat with her thumbs stung raw over a pattern nobody had asked her to finish. The order had come up from the quay in a hand she didn't know: one shawl of black Chantilly, scrolled at the corner like a chapel gate, with red roses worked through the hem and a string of jet beads falling from it, ending in a small iron cross. The widow who wanted it had given no reason, only a price paid in advance and a ribbon of red silk.

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Maud worked by the lamp for six nights. The lace grew from the middle outward, a flower, then a swirl, then another flower, the pins standing up in the pillow like mourners in a churchyard. On the seventh night a boy knocked with a note tied to the silk, and it said only, Leave the cross loose. Her mother had taught her never to leave a thing loose, so Maud sewed the cross on with a knot she could not undo, and the beads hung down in their dark lines like rain that had forgotten how to fall.

The widow never came up the hill. Instead the chandler's wife arrived, out of breath, to say that the widow's husband had gone out in a November gale six years back and that the smack was being sold for debts that week. The shawl was not for wearing, she said. It was to hang in the chandlery window, where the cross would catch the light off the water.

So Maud carried it down in the grey morning and hung it in the glass. The beads swung in the sea wind, and out past the breakwater a single lamp came round the point, slow and low in the water, and someone on the quay lifted a hand to it.