Black and grey dotwork tattoo of paisley-style flowers, leaves and scrolls across a shoulder and upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black ornamental floral scrollwork on a shoulder

Dotwork · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a large ornamental tattoo across a shoulder and upper back, showing mandala-like flowers, paisley curls and leafy vines. The design is built from fine stippled dotwork shading and bold outlines, with denser areas creating depth in the flower centres. The composition follows the curve of the shoulder, with the scrollwork flowing from the upper arm towards the spine.

Dotwork Botanical Shoulder Back Flower Paisley Mandala Scrollwork Leaves Vine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you with the wet cloak, and keep your voice down, because the lamp is low and this tale is old. In Susa, when the river still ran clear under the palace walls, there was a weaver named Parisa who could not sleep unless her hands were busy. Her husband was a dyer. He came home each evening with his fingers stained indigo to the knuckle and found her at the loom past midnight, tying knots by the light of a single wick.

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The governor had ordered a carpet for his new hall and sent a drawing scratched on a clay tablet: round flowers like moons seen through rain, leaves that curled back on themselves. Parisa studied it for three days and wove nothing. On the fourth she pulled a fistful of undyed wool through her teeth to soften it and began again. Every flower she knotted she dotted, a thousand tiny points of dark thread, one for each thing the flood year had taken from her. The curls she let run loose off the edge of the design, as if they had somewhere else to be.

When the carpet was delivered, the governor's wife rolled back one corner and frowned. Where do the flowers end? she asked. They don't, said Parisa. The vines walk out under the doorway and keep going into the yard. The governor laughed, had the carpet cut square to fit the hall, and that night the servants swore the cut ends had sprouted leaves in the lamplight.

Parisa's husband said nothing about it. He only dipped his thumb in the vat and pressed one blue print onto the threshold stone, a single dot for every year they had been married. The governor's wife stepped over it each morning on her way to the gardens, and never once noticed she was walking on a flower.