Lace doily design tattooed in a band around an upper arm, with red ink at the top fading to dark purple and black at the scalloped lower edge.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lace doily band tattoo on an arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A lace doily pattern wraps around the limb in a continuous band, with a central floral motif and fine netting between scalloped edges. The linework is bold and even, and the ink shifts from red at the top to purple and near-black at the bottom. The band fills most of the frame against a dark background, with a checked shirt visible at the right edge.

Upper arm Lace Flower Armband

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

Nan Ivy had crocheted doilies for every flat on the eleventh floor, and when the lift broke for the third time that winter she said the building needed something to hold its shoulders up. So she began on the stairwell window, working a ring of thread from the sill down to the rail, counting stitches under her breath while the pigeons watched.

Keep reading

The council man came with a clipboard and asked what the lace was for. She told him it was to keep the wind out, which was true enough, and he wrote it down as a complaint about draughts. By summer the net had spread to the stairwell door, then the bin store, the scalloped edges running round the concrete like a cuff. The children called it the armband of the tower and dared each other to touch it.

At the top the thread was still bright, as if it had caught the last of the evening. Lower down it darkened, the way the sky does over the car park, until by the ground floor it was near black and full of small knots where the wind had pulled. Nan said that was the point. A building that had been up all night needed a few dark stitches to remember the day by.

The lift was fixed the week she finished. Nobody thanked her, but the lad from the flat below started leaving a jar of tea on her step, and the pigeons kept to the sills where the lace was thickest. When somebody asked if she was done, she bit the thread, held the last loop up to the light, and said a border only holds if it is allowed to go dark at the bottom.