Black and grey botanical tattoo of roses, leaves and dotted stems on an upper arm, with part of an anchor visible at the left edge.

Floral lace-style tattoo on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A cropped photograph of an upper arm carrying a black ink floral design of roses, layered blossoms, feathered leaves and dotted hanging stems. The linework is fine and detailed, with stippled dots and hatched shading giving the flowers depth, and the design wraps from the shoulder area down the outer arm. The image is in black and grey against a plain light background, with a white top covering the wearer's torso.

Botanical Dotwork Upper arm Rose Flower Leaves Anchor

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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

The bobbin frames on the fourth floor of Carrow Lane mill ran all night in my first winter, and I learned to sleep through them by listening for the one that stuttered. When the shift bell went I stayed behind with a lamp, because old lace that came in after dark always seemed urgent.

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The shawl arrived wrapped in brown paper and a tea towel, smelling of camphor. Roses worked in black thread, layered like pastry, with stems that dropped strings of knotted dots and leaves feathered on one side and hatched on the other. It had been mended twice already, badly. Near the border someone had stitched a small anchor, the only thing in the whole piece that wasn't a flower, and it had come out crooked. The woman who brought it, Mrs Ferrin, wouldn't say whose it was. 'Just make the leaves right,' she said. 'He always noticed the leaves.'

Under the lamp I found a sheet of squared paper pinned inside the hem. Someone had counted every petal in pencil: fourteen on the first rose, eleven on the second, and beside the anchor a single word, 'Home'. I matched the feathering stitch by stitch, moving the hook through the mesh the way my grandmother had taught me, and by three in the morning the leaves stood out as crisp as they must have done in 1931.

I left the anchor alone. Nobody had asked me to fix it, and some crooked things only mean what they mean to the hand that made them. At dawn I wrapped the shawl in its paper, tucked the squared sheet back into the hem, and carried it down past the silent frames into a street where the first delivery vans were already grinding up from the river.