Black lace-style flowers and leaves over purple and teal watercolour washes, shown as a tattoo design drawing on a white background.

Lace and watercolour floral design

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

A screenshot of a phone camera roll showing a floral design with black lace-style roses, peonies and leaves arranged in a diagonal sweep. The black linework is fine and detailed, with open lacy patterns inside the petals, set over loose purple, teal and olive watercolour washes. The composition is asymmetric, with the main clusters at the left, centre and lower right of a white background.

Botanical Flower Lace Leaves Floral Rose Peony

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the pig's ear on the step. Now. Past the last stile on the Hollin road lies a wood the old people called Mercy Sallow, because its trees bow over the path like mourners. Nobody cut timber there. Nobody picked blackberries past the first brambles. Then, the spring the Ashby mill burned, a lacemaker called Hester Fell walked in with her bobbin case under one arm and a hank of grey thread spun from her dead mother's shawl.

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She did not come out for three days. When she did, her hands were stained purple to the wrist, as if she had been dipping them in dye pots, and her bobbins were heavy with a lace so fine you could read a newspaper through it. She laid it on the kitchen table and said, "Look what the wood is growing." It was roses, opened like cupped hands. Peonies with hollow centres where the light got in. Leaves pricked full of holes by something very patient.

Now here is the part your mothers never tell you. The lace fed on whatever was lovely in the house. Each time someone in Hollin praised a new bonnet or a christening gown, a little colour drained out of the village, and every morning the bracken on the slope was wetter with teal and olive, as though the hillside were bruising. So the village stopped praising things. It was the hardest winter anyone remembers, and it was Hester who unpicked the first rose and threw it on the fire. The wood sighed like a man let off a debt.

The lace is still out there. Go and look if you dare, by the stile at dusk, and you will see black flowers hanging in the gorse, lovely as anything, and not one of you will say so out loud. Hush now. That's the story. Off to bed.