Botanical tattoo on an upper arm and shoulder, with black lace-like linework and pink and purple flowers, ending in a small black feather.

Lace and flowers across an upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A healed or fresh tattoo covers the upper arm and shoulder, combining black lace-like patterns with large pink and purple flowers. The black linework forms lace motifs, scrolls and fine hanging strands, while the flowers are softly shaded with washes of colour. The composition is angled across the arm, with the bright blooms at the top and the lace fading into dangling detail and a small feather at the lower edge.

Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Flower Lace Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lace came aboard at Gravesend in a tin trunk lined with oilcloth, and by the time the Tamar Rose cleared the Bay of Biscay you had learned its pattern the way you learned knots, by feel and in the dark. Your mother had sent it with a note that said only Keep it dry. It was Nottingham work, black silk net worked into scrolls and hanging tassels that the machine girls called ladders.

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The sea did not care for lace. Salt crept into the folds and bloomed white along the hems, and on the long stretch south the damp pulled the threads slack. You spent evenings at the lamp with a pot of rice starch and a horsehair brush, pinning each scroll flat on a board you had planed from a spare hatch cover. Bosun Harker watched and said nothing, which from him was praise. Once a flying fish struck the rail beside you and lay gleaming on the deck, pink and violet in the lamplight, and you thought of the paired blooms in the cloth, the wide pink face and the purple one swelling behind it, and you pinned them too.

Off the Horn the wind turned vicious and the mainsail blew out. Harker had spare canvas, but the only thing that would hold the tear was the netting you had been saving. You cut it. Your hands did not shake, though you had expected them to. You stitched the seam in a fine line, and the grey gull's quill you had found tangled in the trunk's lining you tied to the lowest tassel for luck.

Landfall at Valparaíso came in April. The ship's sails were ragged, but the lace was whole, and you unfolded it on the quay where a woman in a green shawl stopped to touch a bloom and asked who had made it. You told her the truth, that it had been made by a great many women in a hot room in Nottingham, and that you had only carried it south.