Black ink lace-style tattoo with geometric panels, dotwork chains and a central pendant across the underbust and upper abdomen.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lace-style underbust tattoo with chain drops

Geometric · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo across the underbust and upper abdomen forms a lace-like mandala design. It has a central geometric diamond panel, scalloped edges, flower motifs and dotted chains ending in drop shapes, with a pendant at the centre. The work is shown in black and grey with fine and bold linework and stippled shading, against lightly lit skin, with a dark top held up at the top of the frame.

Geometric Dotwork Chest Lace Mandala Pendant Chain Drop Flower Diamond pattern Geometric pattern Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dearest Nell,

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The pattern book came back from Mrs Garside on Tuesday, and I have not slept properly since. She has marked the page in red ink: a diamond set inside a diamond, every star of it worked in tiny knots so fine I had to hold the lamp close and squint. You will say I am making a fuss. But she laid her mother's pendant beside the drawing, a jet drop on a silver chain, and told me the chain snapped at the Whitsun fair in 1849 and the beads ran off across the floorboards like rain off a roof. Her mother swept for a week and never found the last one.

So I am to make the drops. Forty-one of them, she says, each a little black teardrop hanging from a dotted chain of knots, the way the beads would have hung before they fell. Between them go the scallops and the flowers, and at the centre the pendant, which she insists must be the heaviest thing on the piece, so the whole edge sits true when it is lifted off the pillow.

I worked the first forty by Thursday. This morning, pinning the last drop to the cushion, I found I had made forty-two without meaning to, and the extra one was not on the pattern at all. It was a small, stiff bead of thread, knotted round itself so tightly I could not undo it. I sat there with my bobbins in my lap for a long while, thinking of that floor.

I have left it in. Mrs Garside can count the drops on Friday if she likes. Tell Father I will be home for Sunday dinner, and that I have not forgotten the eggs.

Your loving sister, Hannah