Black lace-style floral tattoo with leaves and flowers running down the outer thigh, shown in a close photograph of healed skin.

Black lace-style floral tattoo on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a large panel of stylised flowers, leaves and scrolling tendrils that imitate black lace, with a fine mesh-like pattern behind the motifs. It is worked in solid black linework with small areas of fill, and the design runs in a diagonal column down the outer thigh. The photograph is taken at close range against a plain skin background, with a hand and a pastel strap visible at the top left.

Botanical Thigh Lace Flower Leaves Scroll Tendril

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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

Dear Hannah, the pattern came by the carrier on Tuesday, and I have pinned it to the bolster already, the way Mother used to pin a dropped stitch to keep it from wandering. Don't scold me for the paper. I know the Honiton thread is dear out there, but the shops in Cape Town sell good linen, and if you keep your tension even and don't hurry the fourth row, nobody will know the difference.

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Mr Gale was at the counter again asking after the Hollis commission, the veil with the bramble edge. I told him it would be finished by Lady Day, and he looked at my hands as though they were a ledger he didn't trust. I said nothing. A lace-maker's hands are meant to be the one thing nobody notices, and I have grown rather good at being unnoticed.

I have been working something of my own in the evenings, when the lamp is low and the bobbins are the only noise. It is a long sprawl of leaves and scrolls, with a fine net showing through behind every flower, the way the light gets through a hedge in June. I have not told anyone what it is for. I have only let the tendrils run wherever they wanted to go.

When it is finished I will roll it in tissue and send it on the next boat. I have left one sprig deliberately unfinished, a curl that runs off the edge of the pattern. You will know where to carry it on from there.