Black ornamental lace tattoo on the nape of the neck
Blackwork · Neck · Black and grey · Photo
The tattoo covers the back of the neck and extends up behind the ear, with a design built from lace-like panels, curling scrollwork, a leaf-like shape and fine scale-like hatching. The linework is bold and uniform, and the fills are solid black with no grey shading. The subject is shown from behind, with the wearer's hair being held apart by two hands at the top of the frame.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The bobbins clacked on the kitchen table long after the fish had gone out, and your grandmother never once looked up from the pattern. She was working a border of fern and scale for the minister's widow, pins pricked into a cushion the colour of old porridge. You were nine and had been told to hold the thread taut, which you did badly.
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Out past the kelp line on Skarra, the sea took what it liked. Her husband had gone under the spring before, and the island still talked about the lace he left unfinished, a panel of leaves that curled off the edge of the cloth like a wave folding back on itself. Nobody on Skarra would touch it. You thought it was the loveliest thing you had ever seen.
On the last night of the herring, you took it from the drawer and unpicked the tail of it with a bodkin, counting the holes the way she had taught you, one, two, scale after scale. Your fingers went cold. Halfway through the leaf you heard her chair scrape back, and you waited for the shout that never came. Instead she stood at your shoulder and smoothed a loose thread from the cloth, very gently, and said the pattern was only a map of where the sea had been.
In the morning she sent the lace to the widow unfinished, with your name pinned to the corner in place of hers.
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