Collage of black lace tattoos on an upper arm, shoulder, upper back, collarbone, side body and lower leg, with grey roses and red and green butterflies in one panel.

Black lace tattoos on arms, back and legs

Blackwork · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

This collage shows six photographs of lace-pattern tattoos on different parts of the body, including the upper arm, shoulder, back, collarbone and leg. The lace is rendered in solid black linework and dense black fill, with some panels adding soft grey shading to two realistic roses and small red and green butterflies. Each photo is framed by a black border, and the close crops keep the focus on the tattoo work.

Blackwork Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Back Chest Ribs Calf Lace Rose Butterfly Leaf Swirl Collage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The net came up from the Bay of Scarrow with a hole in it the size of a man's hand, and Mother Agnes sat down on the quay with her needle and her tar pot before the men had finished unloading. The herring were gone from the nets already. What was left was the mending, and the mending was hers to do, the way it had been her mother's and her mother's mother's.

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She worked through the afternoon and into the dusk, knotting the black twine in the old way that her grandmother had taught her, the double loop and the turn that made a little rose wherever the knots gathered. The fishermen stood about and told her the hole was past saving. She did not look up. Where the twine ran thin she wove a leaf, and where it ran wide she laid a swirl of mesh like the edge of a collar, and in the last corner, where the tear had been worst, she tied a small butterfly with four wings and no body to speak of, because the sea had taken that part already.

The Marigold did not come home that week. The rest of the fleet went out again on the Sunday tide, and nobody spoke Agnes's name, though they all thought it. On the Tuesday, a float-line caught in the rocks below the point, and when the boys hauled it up they found a length of net tangled round a barrel, and in it four men of the Marigold, soaked and grey and too tired to shout. The mended corner had held their weight.

Agnes went down to see the net laid out on the stones. In the grey light the black lace stood out against the wet weed, every rose and leaf dripping, and she said nothing to anyone about it, only picked the twine from the rocks and began to roll it up.