Close view of a black ink paisley and floral tattoo covering the neck and upper chest, in a blackwork botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black paisley and floral neck and chest tattoo

Blackwork · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A person tilts their head back to show a dense black ink tattoo of paisley motifs, leaves and stylised flowers running from the neck down onto the upper chest. The design uses fine, repeated linework with some areas of solid black detail, and the ornament is symmetrical around a central vertical line. The image is in black and grey tones against a striped black and white top and a dim interior background.

Blackwork Botanical Neck Chest Paisley Floral Leaves Ornament Scrollwork Flower

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ada, the drawing came back from the printer in Lowestoft with a ruler's pencil line through the middle of it, and I nearly wept, because I had spent three nights getting every leaf to answer its twin on the far side. The design is a copy of a shawl a sailor brought home from Bombay for his mother, a teardrop curled over on itself, flanked by lilies that look pressed in a psalter. Mr Hale wants it for the spring catalogue. He says nobody buys a thing that isn't balanced, and I have come to think he is right about everything except the people.

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The old pattern had a flaw, a small wrong leaf near the lower curl that the weaver must have put in on purpose, because the sailor's mother used to point to it and say that was where her son's hand had slipped. I left it out. I drew a clean leaf there instead and felt the paper go flat under my pen, as if something in the room was holding its breath.

Last night the harbour bell rang late, so I went down to the quay with the lamp. The boats knocked against their fenders and the wind pulled at the sheet. I held the drawing up against the dark and saw that the ink had bled through from the back, a faint extra leaf sitting exactly where the wrong one used to be. I have decided to leave it there. Mr Hale can hang the clean sheet in the office. This one I am keeping, folded in my coat, so that one leaf in the whole design is mine.