Two matching black bracelet-style tattoos on the inner wrists, with lace-like bands, dotted lines and a small anchor motif.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching lace and anchor bracelet tattoos on wrists

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two matching tattoos sit on the inner wrists or lower forearms, each showing several bands that wrap around the skin. The bands combine lace-like patterns, rows of dots and a small anchor-like motif with a looped ribbon shape at the centre. The work is in black ink only, with clean, even lines and a soft, slightly grainy photo finish, shot close up against a dark background.

Dotwork Forearm Anchor Bracelet Lace Dotted line Band Wrist

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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 big wheel has stopped again with its bulbs half lit, and you are forty feet up a ladder with gaffer tape between your teeth when Lena shouts your name from the grass below. She is holding a biro in one hand and her school compasses in the other, and she wants you down before the generator man comes back from his tea.

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Behind the hoopla stall she takes your wrist and draws, pressing so hard the nib squeaks. First a band of lace, scalloped like the edge of Nan's good tablecloth. Then a row of dots, then another band of lace, then a small anchor with a ribbon looped through its shank, because Nan always said a knot was only worth tying if you meant to come back to it. She does the same on her own wrist, mirror-fashion, and the two pictures sit side by side under the caravan light, one slightly smudged where the damp got in.

The fair packs up on the Sunday and rolls on to Ramsgate, then to Herne Bay, then to places neither of you can pronounce. Lena goes with the hoopla and the lorry. You stay on the waltzers for the rest of the season, counting cars and swallowing diesel fumes, and every night before the lamps come on you check your wrist against the sea wind coming off the front.

The postcard arrives in October with a harbour on the front and no return address, only a line in biro: the ribbon is still tied. You turn your wrist to the window. The ink has gone soft and grey at the edges, the lace nearly gone, but the anchor holds exactly where she put it, and you are not ready to rub it off yet.