Black ink lace-style band tattoo with dotwork and fine lines wrapping around the forearm, above the wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lace-style band tattoo on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink band of ornamental lace-like scrollwork encircles the forearm, with scallops, curled motifs and a row of hanging dots and short drop lines below. The design uses fine linework and stippled dotwork, with solid black accents at the points. The arm is shown against a checkered grey and white floor, with the tattoo as the clear focus.

Dotwork Fine line Forearm Lace Band Ornament Scrollwork Dot Drop

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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 was still pinned to the kitchen table when my grandmother's solicitor rang, which is how I came to be at Dover with a cardboard tube under my arm and a bundle of paper inside my coat. The officer turned the tube over twice and asked what it was. I told him the truth: a lace pattern of scallops and scrollwork with a row of hanging drops, pricked out by hand in 1958 for a wedding veil that never got made.

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He unrolled it on the counter and his thumb found the dots first. Thousands of tiny pinholes, the way the old women marked where each pin would go. 'Who drew this?' he asked. 'She did. She lived above a bakery in Honiton and sold lace to people who never once asked where it came from.' He looked at the drops hanging from the lowest curl and said they looked like earrings somebody had forgotten to wear.

I had come to take her back to Devon in a shoebox of bobbins, but what I really wanted was the pattern, the one with the wrong pin count in the third scallop. She always said the mistake was a joke meant for whoever finished it, and nobody ever had. I had spent a week trying to make the band close without it.

He stamped the tube, handed it back and waved me through. On the ferry I unrolled it across my knees and counted the drops with my finger until I reached the scallop she had cheated. I set a pin into the paper the way she would have, and for the first time the whole band held, a ring of small black points closing like a clasp.