Solid black lace-style tattoo with scrolling leaves and a net pattern running down the right side of a bare back.

Black lace tattoo down the back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A bare back shows a large black tattoo of lace-like ornament that curves from the upper back down towards the side of the waist. The design combines scrolling foliage, leaf shapes, fine netting texture and small dotted lines. It is rendered in solid black ink with no grey shading or colour, and the pattern sits asymmetrically across the skin.

Blackwork Back Lace Scroll Leaves Foliage Dot Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last tent still smelled of sawdust and wet canvas, though Mr Ferrante had sold the elephant in March and the big top had been patched so often it looked like a map of somewhere that no longer existed. I sat on an upturned crate under the rigging lamp, pricking black thread through the hem of the aerialist's sleeve, and tried not to think about the bank letter folded in my apron pocket.

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Lottie had come to me at twelve with a shoebox of bobbins from her grandmother, a lacemaker from Honiton who had never once been to a circus. The lace on her costume was nothing like Honiton. It was a fiction of lace, stitched in black on black velvet so the audience would only see the shape under the lights: fern fronds, a scroll like a fiddlehead, netting so fine you had to squint. I had worked it from a pattern my grandmother drew for me on the back of a gas bill, and I never told Lottie that half of it was my own mistake.

On the final night of the season she climbed to the top bar in that costume and the lamps went down, and for a moment the whole tent was dark except for her. The dotted seams caught the light where the sequins had been, little pinpricks like the holes you make to show where a stitch should go. Nobody in the stands moved. Ferrante wept into his hat and didn't bother to hide it.

Afterwards I unpicked the netting section by section and folded each piece into tissue paper, because lace this fine should not be left to rot in a van. When the lorry rolled out of the field I was still on the crate, a needle between my fingers, the pattern running down the back of my hand like ivy, looking for the place where it was meant to end.