Full back and legs blackwork tattoo
Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo
The photograph shows a person from behind, wearing only a thin thong, with a large blackwork tattoo covering the back, buttocks, thighs and calves. The spine is framed by a dark central panel with a fine lattice and mandala-like geometric pattern, while the hips carry bold swirling motifs and the lower legs carry a honeycomb of hexagons. The ink is solid black with the design formed by negative skin, set against an indoor market background with a smoking area sign and a metal dome structure.
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
Mum taught me the net before she taught me to tell the time. We sat at the kitchen table in Honiton with the pillow wedged between us, and she pinned the first bobbins to the card while the kettle went cold. "Lace is what's left when you take the cloth away," she said, tapping the honeycomb mesh with a pin until I could see it too.
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Nothing else in the house had her patience. Nan's pattern books were soft at the corners, full of lattices copied from cathedral shawls and the edges of old church windows. I drew my own in the back bedroom, pencil on squared paper, the grid so tight a fly would lose its way. Mum liked the spirals best, the ones that turned in on themselves like foam at the weir. She said they were the one thing in the book she could never have drawn herself.
The commission came from a shop in Bath that wanted a window dressed for the autumn sale. The buyer asked for a single panel: a long black column with fine lattice on either side, waves of spiral at the bottom and honeycomb running down to the floor. I spent three weeks on it, pricking the pattern through the card with a needle, and Mum sat beside me checking every hexagon against her own count. She didn't say it was good. She said it was finished, which from her was the same thing.
On the last morning I cut the black card away wherever the lace should show, then set the panel in the window and stood back. Sunlight came through the holes and laid the whole pattern on the pavement, pale on grey, swirls and honeycomb printed where the card had been taken away. A woman stopped to look, then a boy, then a man with a dog. Mum would have said that was the lace doing its job. I just stood there holding the scissors, watching the light move across the street.
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