Black dotwork lace band tattoo with dangling dotted lines on the lower leg above the ankle, worn beside a black peep-toe heel.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lace band with dotted drops on an ankle

Dotwork · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A leg wearing a black peep-toe high heel shows a band tattoo that looks like a lace border, with a scalloped top edge and a row of small motifs. Thin dotted lines hang down from the band in evenly spaced drops. The tattoo is solid black ink on a light skin tone, set against a plain white background.

Dotwork Ankle Lace Band

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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 pricking card had been Nan's before it was mine, and the holes had softened at the edges from forty years of pins. I held it up to the window in Honiton on a wet Tuesday and counted them again, because Mrs Pyle would not accept a border with a single dot out of line.

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The scallops came first, twelve to a repeat, each one worked round a pin with a half-hitch so the thread sat like a bead of rain on a leaf. Below them the drops hung on their long threads, one every finger's width, and those were the part nobody liked. Bobbins clicked and tangled. Your fingertips ached for a week after. I did the drops last, when the light had gone grey and the lamp was pulled close over the pillow.

On the last evening Mrs Pyle came round with her spectacles pushed up into her hair and ran her thumb along the edge without quite touching the lace. Then she turned the card over and showed me the pinholes on the back, a row of small cratered dots where Nan had pricked through from the wrong side. 'The drops are where you start the thread,' she said. 'Every one of them is a place you could have stopped.'

I bound off the strip that night and stitched it to the card with one white thread. In the morning I cut it free, wrapped it in tissue and carried it to the post van in a shoebox. Only on the walk home did I understand that I had spent a whole winter making a border for a dress nobody had asked me to sew.