Black fine-line fleur-de-lis on a finger and an ornate lace-pattern tattoo on the wrist, photographed on a hand resting on brown leather.

Fleur-de-lis finger and lace wrist tattoo

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A small black fleur-de-lis sits on the side of one finger, with simple solid linework. On the wrist, a larger ornamental design of overlapping lace-like scallops, circles and a central raised-looking bead is drawn in black linework with fine dot accents. The hand rests on a brown leather surface, and the photo is warm-toned with the tattoos centred in the frame.

Hand Forearm Fleur-de-lis Lace Mandala Finger Wrist Ornament Dot

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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

Sit closer, the lamps are going dim and I won't raise my voice over the pumps. My great-grandmother's mother kept the mending loom on Halvard Reach, back when the reach still had a window to the sky. She could close a cracked seal with a needle and tallow thread, and she could tell you which gulls meant rain by the set of their wings. Nobody aboard trusted a patch that had not been stamped with the iris, so she wore a brass fleur-de-lis on a chain and pressed it wet into every seam she finished. Three days of ration bread for a clean stamp, that was the going rate.

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Then the trouble came up through the lower decks in the shape of Magistrate Oren Halloway's clerk, a thin man with ink on his cuffs. The outer ring had sprung a weep near the old bulkhead, the place where the first colonists had bolted the hull to the spine, and the Magistrate wanted it sealed by morning with his own mark. She told him the bulkhead would not take a plain patch. It needed lace, a web of overlapping scallops laid over the crack so the stress spread out like frost on glass, with a bead of sealing resin set at the centre where the metal wanted to move.

He laughed at the lace. He laughed less when the weep stopped in the night and the air in the lower corridors stopped hissing. Still he wanted his name on the iris, so he sent his clerk down with the brass stamp in a velvet box, and the clerk pressed it into the wet resin, and the fleur-de-lis came up the wrong way round.

She never corrected him. The seal held for forty years. And every child on the reach learned that a good mend looks like lace, and that the bead in the middle is the part that keeps you breathing.