Black and grey lace-style floral tattoo running down the side of the back and ribs, with scrollwork, leaves and hanging bead chains.

Lace-style floral tattoo on ribs and back

Botanical · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A large floral design with lace-like patterns runs vertically from the upper back down the side of the ribs, with a second cluster lower on the torso. The linework is fine and dark, with shaded panels, scrolls, paisley-like leaves and small dotted chains hanging between the motifs. The tattoo is entirely black and grey against the skin, and the composition follows the curve of the torso.

Botanical Fine line Ribs Back Lace Flower Leaf Scroll Paisley Floral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pattern had come back from the mill with three pins missing, and Ada Pring would not forgive it. She held the paper up to the front room window in Honiton, where the light came grey off the slate roofs, and counted the scrolls again. Eleven leaves, a teardrop swelling at the base of each, and the little chain of beads that ran between the flowers like a necklace someone had dropped down a stair.

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Her niece Maureen had been sent to fetch the thread from the post office, and she came back with it wrapped in brown paper and a story about a man in a van. Ada didn't listen. She set the bobbins clicking, sixty pairs of them, and let her hands go ahead of her thinking. The lace grew the way it always did: a fan of net at the centre, then the rosette, then the curl that turned back on itself like a fern unwinding in a damp garden.

By the third evening the chain of beads was done, and Maureen, who had been sulking on the stairs, came down to look. Ada had worked a tiny pearl into each loop, so the thread seemed to hang from the flower and swing when the lamp moved. "You can't see the knots," said Maureen. "No," said Ada. "That's the trick of it. Nobody should have to see how a thing was held together."

The piece went to the mill on Thursday, folded in tissue. Ada kept the pins in her apron pocket, all eleven, and she found the three missing ones in March, pushed down in the biscuit tin with the buttons. She left them there, since the pattern had come out better without them.