Black and grey photograph of a lace-pattern tattoo with flowers and baroque scrollwork across a woman's upper arm and shoulder.

Lace and scrollwork tattoo on an upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a woman's upper arm and shoulder, with her lips and chin visible at the top of the frame. The tattoo combines a diamond lattice resembling lace, with small five-petal flowers set into the mesh, and ornate acanthus-style scrolls and leaves that wrap along the outer arm. The shading is soft grey with dark outlines, and the dark background sets off the design.

Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Lace Scrollwork Flower Leaves

Find an artist for this

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

The wagon smelled of paraffin and wet canvas the night you first unrolled Aunt Maud's pattern book across the trestle, and the generator coughed twice before the organ found its key. Her hand had drawn every page: diamond mesh ruled in pencil, a five-petalled flower pricked into each cell like a stain of frost. You had been sent to fetch her bobbins, not to read anything, but the margins were crowded with instructions in a hand that leaned forward as if it were in a hurry.

Keep reading

Scroll first, Aunt Maud had written, then the mesh, and the flowers last, or they sink. Along the outer edge ran acanthus leaves curling back on themselves, drawn so many times the paper had gone soft as cloth. You worked under the lamp until your eyes ached, feeding thread through the pillow and counting pairs the way she taught you. Outside, the Ferris wheel's bulbs clicked on one by one, and a boy shouted that the strongman had got out of his trunk again.

On the last page there was no pattern, only a list of towns in pencil, each with a date and a single flower beside it. Ely. Wisbech. Spalding. Your own village, which you had never told anyone you were leaving, sat at the bottom with its flower already filled in, the petals still pale. You understood then that the fair was not going on without you. It was going on with you on the page.

Dawn came grey over the showground. You pinned the finished length to the carousel canopy so the morning sun would find every hole in it, and watched the light come through the flowers one by one, scattering dark little stars across the painted horses. When the lorries started up, you did not climb into the cab. You let the lace stay where it hung, and let them drive on.