Black ornamental tattoo on the inner forearm with floral motifs, paisley-style shapes and solid bands, shown on a person's arm resting on a dark bag.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental band and floral tattoo on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo wraps around the forearm as a series of bands, with floral sprigs, scrolling vines and a paisley-like teardrop motif. Fine and solid black lines create the pattern, with some areas filled and others left as open outlines. The ink is black on skin tone, and the arm is photographed against a dark leather surface.

Blackwork Forearm Flower Paisley Vine Ornament Band Pattern

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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

Marisol Hendry had the shawl folded across her knees on the platform bench at Crewe, the Manchester train twelve minutes late and the departures board clicking over like a fruit machine. Her aunt Nessa had sent it in a carrier bag with a note tucked into the fringe: Keep the border straight. Don't let them bind the edge.

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The border ran in bands. Between two rules of solid black thread sat a row of small five-petalled sprigs, then a scroll of vine that doubled back on itself, then a teardrop shape that curled at the tip like a seed head about to open. Nessa had copied it from a pattern book her own mother kept in a terraced house in Bolton, working by the lamp after the shop shut, and she had never once let anyone else touch it.

A man in a rail company fleece asked whether the seat beside her was free. She moved the shawl, and he glanced at the sheet of tracing paper pinned inside the bag, where she had been trying to draw out the missing vine so she could match it. He said his gran had something like that, and then he got off at the wrong stop for his own train and didn't notice.

She found the flaw in the third band. One teardrop was only an outline, its inside left open to the white cotton, and she had always assumed Nessa ran out of thread. Now she thought otherwise. When the Glasgow train rolled in, Marisol folded the shawl along its old creases, left that petal empty, and climbed aboard with the open shape warm against her palm.