Two photos of a shoulder and upper arm tattoo with a pink and purple flower, black lace pattern, hanging chains and a feather, in a botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lace, flower and feather on upper arm

Botanical · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo covers the shoulder and upper arm, with a large pink and purple flower at the top framed by black lace-like patterning. Thin dangling chains and small beads hang down the arm, ending in a shaded feather. The flower uses soft shading in pink and purple, while the lace and chains are rendered in solid black linework, and the two photos show the design from different angles.

Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Flower Lace Feather Chain Bead

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Honiton, 1887. Ada Penhallow had been told twice that week that her peony was too loud for a lace pattern, and she was tired of being told things by men who had never once threaded a bobbin. The cloth in front of her was a collar for the vicar's wife, black thread on a pillow stuffed with horsehair, and somewhere under the grid of pins she had grown a flower where the pricking said there should be a leaf.

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Her grandmother had kept the old book in a tin under the stairs. It held pricked patterns gone soft at the edges, and a pressed feather tucked between two pages of wheels and ground. Ada had never asked why the feather was there. She assumed it had been a bookmark that stayed.

Each bobbin hung from its pin on a short cord, weighted with a bead of jet, and when she lifted the pillow they swung and knocked together like a row of small bells. She counted them the way her grandmother had taught her, forty-two on the left, thirty-eight on the right, and the last one, the one that kept the thread taut, she had weighted with a brass bead shaped like a quill.

On Saturday the vicar's wife came to the cottage to fetch the collar. She held it up to the window, turned it over, and found the peony in the middle of the scrollwork where no peony belonged. She said nothing for a long time. Then she asked, quite gently, whether Ada could make another, and whether it could have the flower again. Ada pulled the feather from the tin and set it on the table between them, and the bobbins on the sill stirred in the draught and chimed.