Black ink hamsa hand with ornate lace-like patterns running down the centre of a woman's back, seen from behind.

Hamsa and lace design along the spine

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman sits on a bed with her back to the camera, showing a long vertical tattoo running down the centre of her spine. The design centres on a hamsa hand with a small heart-like motif in its palm, framed by intricate filigree, paisley-like and lace-style ornamentation. The ink is solid black with fine dotted and lined detail, and the composition is softly lit by window light against a pale headboard.

Blackwork Back Hamsa Hand Heart Lace pattern Filigree Ornament Spine Woman

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the fire is low and the wind has got into the chapel roof again. You want the story of Sister Mabel's lace, the one the abbess would not let anyone touch after the thaw.

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Mabel worked the bobbins in the workroom above the cellar, where the light came in grey through the shutters and the pins stood in the cushion like frost on a hedge. She had been set to make a border for the altar cloth, a plain thing, a day's work. Instead she began a long strip that climbed from the hem toward the collar, a vine that grew and forked and grew again. At its heart she worked an open hand, five fingers spread, and in the palm a small knot shaped like a heart. The sisters crossed themselves when they saw it. The old hand, they said, against the eye that looks too long at what is good.

Her brother had gone down to the coast that autumn with the salt boats. Each evening Mabel added one more row, and each morning the lace was longer than the day before, until it ran the length of the nave and the abbess began to count the rows on her fingers in her sleep. When the boats came home one hull short, the abbess took the strip down from its hook and turned it over in her hands. She found that the knot in the palm had been tied with a thread the colour of her brother's coat, and she did not ask Mabel how it had got there.

They cut the lace into lengths that winter and sent a finger's width of it with every boat that sailed. Today every fishing family in the parish sews a strip of it into the hem of a coat. Mind the wind on the stairs going up. There is a lamp by the door, and mind the step.