Black blackwork tattoo of an ornate lace pattern wrapping around a forearm, with skin showing through the open scrollwork.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lace cuff tattoo on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black lace or doily design forms a band around the forearm, with a central medallion surrounded by scalloped edging and floral-style scrollwork. The ink is dense black, and the open areas of the pattern leave the skin visible, which gives the lace its delicate look. The image is a close, straight-on shot of the forearm against a dark background, with the design filling most of the frame.

Blackwork Forearm Lace Scrollwork Medallion Pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The clock above the nurses' station on Ward Seven had run ten minutes slow since October, and Sister Doyle said that was the only honest thing in the building. At ten past three, Mr Halloran in bed nine asked me, for the fourth time, whether I had found his wife's tablecloth. I had not. I had searched the lost property bags and the linen cupboard, and I had promised to try again after my round.

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The stores basement smelt of damp cardboard and disinfectant. Under a stack of folded blankets I found a box marked Halloran, Bed 9, and inside it, wrapped in tissue gone the colour of weak tea, was a cloth as wide as my forearm is long. Scrolls and rosettes had been worked in thread so fine I had to hold the torch close to see the stitches. A round medallion sat at the centre, scalloped all the way round, and the gaps between the threads were so many small windows that the torchlight came through them in a dozen places at once.

Back on the ward I laid it across his blanket. He didn't speak for a while. Then he traced the central rosette with one finger and said she had made the pattern up from a dinner plate, that she never once used a book, and that he had told her it looked like frost on a window. He said it so quietly that I had to lean in. Sister Doyle passed with the drugs trolley, stopped, and watched without saying anything.

At half past five he was still awake when the light came up grey over the car park. I folded the cloth back into its tissue and took it down to the chapel, because he had asked me to, and laid it on the altar table where the morning sun comes in first. When I climbed the stairs again the clock on the landing said six, and for once I believed it.