Black lace-pattern tattoo wrapping the wrist and forearm, shown in a blackwork style in a two-panel close-up.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lace cuff tattoo on wrist

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A two-panel collage shows a black lace-pattern band tattooed around the wrist, with a hand resting on white sheets in the top panel and a closer view of the forearm in the bottom panel. The lace has fine, open mesh linework with denser filled motifs and a scalloped lower edge. The ink is solid black on pale skin against a soft white background.

Blackwork Forearm Lace Lace pattern Cuff 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 is the hard part, Mrs Hale said, because a pin cannot be taken back. You sat at her kitchen table in Beer with the parchment held flat under the lamp, pressing holes along the scalloped edge with a bodkin that had been her mother's. Every mistake would show in the finished band, so you went slowly, counting the gaps between scallops as she had taught you, until your thumb ached and the paper was blue with pencil.

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The pillow waited by the window with its bobbins hung in rows like small pale bells. The order came from a woman in Axminster who wanted a band for her wrist, copied from the veil her grandmother had worn at her wedding. Mrs Hale worked the ground first, the tiny hexagons that never sag, then the roses, dense in some places and open in others so the light could pass through. You learned to read her hands rather than the pattern. Cross, twist, pin. Cross, twist, pin.

On the last evening she held the finished strip up to the window and frowned at one scallop that sat a fraction too low. You reached for the seam ripper. 'Leave it,' she said. 'Her grandmother's veil had a mend in it too. The husband's been at sea since March and he'll know her hand. A perfect copy would only tell him it was bought.'

You tied off the last thread and lifted the band from the pins. It came away whole and warm from your fingers, the one low scallop turned outward where it would catch the light.