Back of a woman in a black halter top showing a large black and grey lace-style ornamental tattoo running down the spine, placed across the back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lace-pattern back piece down the spine

Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo covers the centre of the back from the upper shoulders to the lower back, built from ornate scrollwork, floral motifs and a fine lace-like mesh. The linework is dense and detailed, with soft grey shading that gives depth to the petals and swirls. The dark background and black halter top keep the focus on the tattoo, which is framed symmetrically down the spine.

Back Lace Ornament Scrollwork Flourish Floral Spine Filigree Petal

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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 bobbins were still clicking in Mrs Pascoe's front room when the lifeboat came round the point, forty pairs of them, and I had my hands full of threads that would not lie flat. My mother had taught me to count the pinholes in a pricking before I counted anything else. Hold the pattern to the window, she used to say, and the light will tell you where the mistakes are hiding.

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That winter the orders came from Plymouth and Exeter, lace for collars and christening gowns, and we worked by lamplight with the harbour knocking against the wall outside. The ground was a net of tiny hexagons that had to be twisted just so, then the petals were built up in heavier thread and the scrolls filled in like fern unrolling. Mother said a petal was only a knot that had learnt manners. My father's boat was the Clemency, and he sailed her out every morning past the breakwater with the gulls chasing her stern.

The Clemency came back without him in March, and nobody could say how. On the Tuesday after the funeral the nets drying on the quay had tangled into a shape I knew, a long spine of scroll and bloom, and I stood there with my shawl over my head until the tide turned. I went home and took the old pricking down from the wall. I worked that spine onto the lining of his oilskin one knot at a time, so that when it hung on the peg by the door it looked as though the sea had sketched him in lace.