Black lace and floral tattoo wrapping around the upper arm of a woman in a grey t-shirt, with the arm bent at the elbow.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black lace tattoo on upper arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman's upper arm, bent at the elbow, carries a black lace-patterned tattoo with floral motifs that curl around the arm. The linework is dark and detailed, with solid black areas and fine openwork shading that mimics lace. The image is in black and grey, with the skin tone and grey t-shirt as the main background colours.

Blackwork Botanical Upper arm Lace Flower Ornamental Arm tattoo

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Pengelly kept the pattern books in a tin under the window, because the damp in Honiton got into paper faster than it got into thread. Ada was twelve and had been allowed to touch them only on Sundays, when the bobbins were stilled and the cottage smelt of cold tea and linseed. The book her grandmother had left held a sheet of card pricked with a thousand tiny holes, and each hole marked where a pin would go, and each pin a turn of the bobbins.

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By the end of a week of rain, Ada had the flower in her fingers before she had it on the pillow. Scrolls that opened like ferns, a rose with its petals folded back, a leaf that was really two leaves pretending to be one. Mrs Pengelly would not let her hurry. "Lace is counting that doesn't look like counting," she said, and tapped the card where a single pin had been pushed in crooked.

That crooked pin was the one Ada could never forgive. She had tried to mend it with a fresh pin, and it had only made a second hole, a small gap that split the leaf in two. On the last evening of the month she carried the card to the window and watched the light come through the open ground the way it came through a real veil. The gap was the brightest part. She stitched it closed in the old way, leaving the mistake exactly where it sat, and when the lamp was lit the leaf seemed to be turning its face towards the glass.