A black linework sleeve tattoo on an upper arm and forearm, showing a crowned queen with ornamental scrollwork and a lion or animal motif near the wrist.

Crowned queen sleeve in linework

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A full arm sleeve in black outline, dominated by a crowned female portrait at the upper arm with flowing filigree and scroll ornaments below. Lower on the forearm, a partly visible animal head and foliage fill the space towards the wrist. The image is in black and grey, with the skin tone and sparse shading showing through the open linework.

Neo-trad Upper arm Forearm Queen Crown Portrait Ornament Scroll Animal Foliage Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The master wanted the lines thin enough to breathe, which was the first thing Ada Pryce did not understand. He stood over her board in the drawing room above the Radford mill, his watch chain swinging, and tapped the crown she had inked in one steady curve. "Close it up and the lace will be a sheet of cardboard," he said. "Leave the skin showing through."

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She had copied the queen from a playing card her brother brought home from Calais, the face turned three quarters to the light, hair coiled into scrolls that became ferns and then a stag's head caught in ivy at the bottom of the sheet, where the cuff would fall. Every filigree arm she drew broke off into open paper, as though the pattern had been left unfinished on purpose.

Through the winter she worked the design up to eleven sheets, and the mill girls cut and stitched them into collars that went to London wrapped in tissue. Ada never saw one worn. What she saw was the drawing room at dusk, the low sun coming through her spoiled tracings and laying a queen across the wallpaper, crown first, every gap a bright coin of light.

When the master found the twelfth sheet on her table, he did not ask her to close it. He pinned it to the west window, where the afternoon came through every open line and set the queen across the floorboards, and he left it there until the paper went the colour of weak tea. Ada kept her pen steady after that. The gaps were the point, she understood, and the light could finish what she had only begun.