Black and grey dotwork tattoo of paisley motifs and flowering stems covering the upper arm, with a dark tank top at the shoulder.

Floral paisley dotwork on upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large ornamental design of stylised flowers, leaves and paisley forms fills the upper arm, with a central teardrop medallion and dotted outlines. The linework is fine and dense, and the shading is built from stippled dots that give the pattern a lace-like texture. The design is entirely black and grey and is framed by the arm's curve against a dark sleeveless top.

Dotwork Botanical Upper arm Paisley Flower Leaves Stem Medallion Ornament Lace pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lace was meant to be finished before the frost came down on the valley, and Hanne had three weeks of thread left on the bobbin. She worked at the window of the widow Oszkar's cottage, where the light fell in a long grey strip across the table. Every evening the carter's boy came up the track with a basket of cut flax and left it on the step without knocking, the way his father had taught him.

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The pattern had come to her in a dream of her mother's hands, teardrops of linen stitched in rows, each one holding a smaller blossom inside it. She pricked the dots first, hundreds of them, because her mother always said a lace that was not dotted first would crack at the first wash. The stems ran up from the centre like a fern unrolling, and the leaves curled back on themselves in the way the wind bent the poplars by the river.

On the last night the thread snapped at the medallion, right at the middle where the teardrop closed. Hanne sat with the broken ends between her fingers and cursed softly. Then she heard the boy on the step, though he had not knocked, and she went to the door with the lamp. He had left a single flax stem, bent into a loop, tied with red wool. She understood then that he had been watching the window all autumn, and that the pattern had never been hers alone. She knotted the thread, drew it through, and finished the last dot before dawn.