Black ink lace-style ornamental tattoo with a lotus flower and drop motifs across the back of a woman's neck and upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lace-style lotus neck tattoo

Dotwork · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows the back of a woman's neck and upper back, with her hair pinned up. The tattoo is a symmetrical ornamental design shaped like a high collar, with a lace-like scalloped border, a central heart-shaped panel, and two stacked lotus flowers. Fine dotted lines and small drop shapes hang below, and the shading is built from stippled dots. It is rendered in black ink only, against pale skin and a light pink top.

Dotwork Botanical Neck Back Lotus Lace Ornament Mandala Heart Drop Dotted line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bobbins were still clicking when Mrs Pell told Agnes to stop counting pins and look at the collar instead. It lay across the table like a fallen gate, all scallops and cobweb, the mesh so fine that the lamplight came through it in small grey coins. Agnes had pricked the pattern herself that week, three pinholes for every dot, and she had got two of the drops the wrong way round.

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The commission had come up from Exeter with a pot of ink and a drawing on thin paper. A sea captain's widow wanted a neck-piece for her daughter's wedding in Bombay. The drawing showed a heart within a horseshoe, two lotus flowers stacked like candles, and a trail of little tears falling down the centre. Mrs Pell would not weave the heart shut. She said a heart in Honiton lace was only ever an open hole with good manners, and she left its middle to the air.

Agnes unpicked the second lotus three times that night while the coal settled. Each time Mrs Pell watched from the rocking chair and said nothing, until the fourth time, when she set down her pipe and reached for the drawing. Turning it over, Agnes found a faded line in a grandmother's hand, a single sentence about a ship's cook who had taught her to draw flowers that opened only after dark.

They finished it on the last Thursday of the month, the drops hung on the finest thread and the open heart catching the window. The coach to Exeter left at dawn with the collar folded in tissue and a note pinned to the lid. Agnes had worked the last tear herself, a single dot of thread no bigger than a seed, and she had let it sit slightly crooked, because straight things were easy to copy and this one was not meant to be copied.