Black and grey lace-style floral sleeve tattoo running from the upper arm to the forearm, worn by a person in a dark red dress.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lace-style floral sleeve on the arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A full arm sleeve of ornamental lace-like designs, with flowers, scrollwork, looping curves and openwork panels, covers the upper arm and runs down to the forearm. The fine black linework is densely detailed, with soft grey shading that gives the pattern depth against the skin. The tattoo fills most of the frame, with a dark red dress and a necklace visible at the edge of the shot.

Botanical Fine line Upper arm Forearm Lace Flower Scrollwork Sleeve Ornamental Filigree

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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 scraper in your hand has already taken three coats of white off the gallery rail by the time the wind turns, and the iron underneath is older than anyone on Scarrow Rock will admit. Mr Pell, the keeper, stands at the foot of the ladder holding a flask he has not offered you yet. 'Don't go down to the rosettes,' he says. 'Whoever cast them meant them to be seen from the sea, not from a foot away.'

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You go down to the rosettes anyway, because the paint has crazed there and the rust has lifted the pattern into relief. Beneath the grey you find ferns folding into ferns, a scallop of petals, a ring of pierced holes like lace left out in the rain. Every hole is a place the light can get through. The foundry at Hartlepool sent the sections up in crates marked FRAGILE, and a clerk's handwriting on the packing list asks for the scrollwork 'as fine as a collar.'

Pell tells you the lens was ground in Paris and the iron was pattern-cut by his grandmother's sister, who sat with the lamp turned low and drew on brown paper until the shapes were right. That night, when you climb up to trim the wick, the lens throws the lace out over the water in pale spokes, and somewhere a trawler you cannot see turns its bow and comes home.

In the morning you sand the last rosette bare and leave it unpainted, and Pell does not tell you to fix it.