Black blackwork lace tattoo with floral motifs and fine mesh detail running diagonally across the upper and side back.

Black lace tattoo across a back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A bare back shows a large black lace-style tattoo that sweeps from the top of the shoulder blade down towards the side of the waist. The design combines scrolling foliage, flower-like shapes, fine mesh infill and dotted hanging trails. The ink is solid black with soft skin tone visible between the motifs, and the composition follows the curve of the spine.

Blackwork Back Lace Floral Scrollwork Leaves

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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 fair folds itself up at midnight, and you are still on your knees behind the lace stall, combing wet grass for pins. Mrs Okonedo has already gone to her caravan with the bobbins wrapped in a tea towel, saying only that frost is coming and lace hates a cold hand. A single black thread has caught on a tent peg. You wind it round your finger before you think better of it.

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The lace was hers, though she never wore any. Her pattern book was a ledger of scrolls: leaves that curled back on themselves like ferns unfolding in reverse, flowers that opened onto nothing, mesh so fine it held the lamplight like smoke. Every commission took a season. The last had been a vine for a farmer's widow in the next county, running from a collar down towards the hip, and you had driven it there on the back seat of a borrowed van, the hatbox tied shut with baling twine.

At the farmhouse the widow turned the lace over in her hands and said the trail was wrong. The dots should hang loose at the end, she said, like rain that has not yet decided to fall. Mrs Okonedo would have sighed. You knelt on the kitchen flags with pins between your teeth and tied each dot to the mesh while the kettle went cold, and nobody spoke until the last knot was tight.

Driving back, the thread on your finger has dried into a thin dark line that will not wash off. You tell yourself it is only dye from the bobbin. At the next fairground Mrs Okonedo looks at your hand, nods once, and passes you the scissors, as if she has been waiting for you to start a pattern book of your own.