Colour and black lace-style tattoo of flowers and leaves on a woman's lower leg, with a pink bloom, red poppy and yellow leaves below black lace patterns.

Lace and flowers on a calf

Botanical · Calf · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo covers the outer calf and combines black lace-like patterns at the top with a pink flower, a red poppy and yellow leaves lower down, finished with another lace motif at the base. The black linework and lace shading are fine and detailed, while the flowers use soft blended colour. The photo is taken outdoors on a pavement from a standing angle, showing the leg and sandals.

Botanical Calf Lace Flower Lotus Poppy Leaf Sandal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dye vats behind the Halifax mill had been cold since March, and Agnes Pollard knew the blue would not come back to the wool without her father's copper pot. She stood on the wet cobbles with a stack of unpicked bobbins under one arm and watched the carter unload a crate of Nottingham net that nobody had ordered.

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The net was black, stiff as a starched collar, and it smelled of the warehouse in Leeds. Her mother had always said black lace was for mourning and the church, never for the weaving sheds, but the new foreman had a catalogue of patterns from France, and one of them was a rosette of looped thread that Agnes had spent a whole week trying to copy by hand on the back of a ledger. She had got the petals right. The centre always came out lopsided.

On Thursday she took the ledger to the dye shed and pressed a scrap of the black net flat against the window. Through the lace the afternoon light fell in small dark stars across the floor. She dipped a brush in the rose madder her father had kept for the poppies, then in the saffron for the leaves, and painted the petals in thin washes so the black threads showed through. The lotus she did last, a fat pink bloom that sat on the lace like a stone in a pool, and when it dried she stood back and saw what the foreman would never see: the pattern had been waiting for colour all along.

He bought the piece for a shilling, lace on one side and flowers on the other. Agnes kept the ledger.