Large black lace-style tattoo on a person's back, with symmetrical paisley scrollwork, flowers and filigree running down the spine.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lace-style back tattoo with flowers

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large, symmetrical tattoo covers the centre of the back, built from paisley scrollwork, filigree and lace-like panels that run from the neck to the lower back. Two flower motifs sit on either side of the lower section, with fine dotted and netted linework behind them. The design is rendered in black and grey ink on smooth skin, with the composition centred along the spine.

Botanical Back Lace Paisley Scrollwork Filigree Flower Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sister Agathe had been mending the altar cloth since Candlemas, and by the third week of Lent her needle had worn a groove in the middle finger of her left hand. The abbess came down to the sewing room each afternoon to look at the work and say nothing about it. On the fifth day she picked up the cloth and held it to the window, and the light came through a hundred small holes that were not holes at all but the fine knots of a pattern too thin to see from across a room.

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"Who taught you to make the net first and the flowers after?" she asked.

Agathe said her mother had, in a village where the lace was sold to merchants who never once looked at the women who made it. Her mother had said that a flower with nothing around it is only a stain, and that the lace is the part that holds the flower up. Agathe had carried that sentence from one convent to the next like a stone in her shoe.

The abbess folded the cloth along its old crease and laid it back in the basket. In the morning the bishop's man would come for the altar set, and Agathe would be sent with it. She went to the window and saw the cloister garden through a grid of wet knots, every bed and bush gone soft and grey, and understood that the abbess had never wanted her to finish the flowers at all. The net was the thing the community was made of, and the flowers were only what it could hold.