Black and white photo of a fine line dotwork tattoo of draped chains running from the shoulder down the upper arm, worn by a person in a tank top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Draped chain tattoo on shoulder and upper arm

Fine line · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a person from behind in a tank top, with a tattoo of draped chains fanning down from the top of the shoulder across the upper arm. The linework is fine and black, with small dots and beads hanging from the swags, giving a delicate, jewellery-like effect. The image is black and white, with a soft background that includes a framed sign reading TATTOO SHOP.

Fine line Dotwork Shoulder Upper arm Chain Bead Jewellery

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tomas had finished stringing the jet beads on the last Tuesday of August, when the wasps had given up on the windfalls and the light in Hollins Orchard turned the colour of weak tea. Mags Hollins had handed him a tin of seed beads and a spool of waxed thread and said the place needed dressing for the harvest supper. He had hung the chains from branch to branch, each swag sagging a little lower than the one above it.

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Each swag ended in a drop bead, and he had paused at every knot to tie it off the way his grandmother taught him to finish a hem. By evening the sun came through the fringe and laid small black coins across the grass. Villagers walking up for cider stopped under the arches and touched the beads with one finger, as if testing whether they were cold.

Ruth, Mags's daughter, home from the city for the week, walked the rows counting. 'Nine swags,' she said. 'There are only seven trees with room for them.' Tomas said the other two were for the ones that came down in March, the old Coxes that had split at the fork. He had not meant to say it aloud.

Mags said nothing. She climbed the stepladder, unhooked the lowest drop from the last swag, and wound the spare length of thread around her wrist twice, so that when she reached up for the late pears the beads knocked softly against each other, like coins in a pocket.