Black and grey sleeve tattoo on a woman's arm showing butterflies, a small anchor, lace-like ornament and large flowers, from upper arm to forearm.

Butterflies, anchor and florals on a full sleeve

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman's arm, visible below a white lace sleeve, is covered in a full sleeve of tattoos featuring butterflies, a small anchor, lace-like ornamental motifs and large flowers. The linework is fine and detailed, with soft grey shading in the petals and wings. The arm is held in another person's hand against a dark suit, and the tattoos are sharply in focus across the centre of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Hale kept the lace pattern book in the drawer under the tide tables, and it was there that Tamsin found the drawing of the anchor on the morning her father's boat failed to come in. The anchor was small, no bigger than a thumbnail, and it had been pricked into the paper so many times that the holes made a grey shadow around it.

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"Your father would want the tide tables, not sentiment," Mrs Hale said, but she didn't take the book back. She had lost a husband to the same grey water thirty years before, and she had never once pinned her hair with a metal clip, in case it reminded her of the rigging.

Tamsin carried the book home along the harbour wall. At the chandler's she traded two bobbins of linen thread for a tin of ink, and by evening she had begun pricking out butterflies on the back of her forearm, dipping the needle in soot and then in the gum of wild peony, because that was what her grandmother had said made lines hold. Every wing she finished, she felt a little lighter, as though the weight of the anchor were moving off her chest and onto the paper.

The boat came in on the fourth morning, low in the water with only two men aboard. Her father stepped onto the quay and saw the arm she held out to him, flowering with lace from wrist to elbow, and he laughed so hard he had to sit down on a coil of rope. "You've gone and sailed without me," he said. "Save me a corner for my own, then."

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