Black and grey ornamental band tattoo with paisley and lotus-like motifs wrapping the upper arm, below a dark top with embroidered flowers on the sleeve.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental band tattoo on upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A close view of a upper arm covered in a wide band of ornamental linework, with paisley-like forms, a lotus-style motif and stacked decorative borders. The lines are fine and even, with light shading in the fills, and the tattoo is entirely black and grey. The arm sits beside a dark grey top with pink, green and yellow embroidered flowers on the sleeve, and the crop leaves the face out of frame.

Upper arm Ornament Paisley Lotus Pattern Border Band

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The border was the last thing Abu Kasim let me cut, and he only let me because his eyes had started to swim over the fine work. I had spent three weeks on the lotus alone, a pear of teak no bigger than my palm, taking the gouge around each petal until the wood curled away like paring from an apple. He would lean over my shoulder, smelling of linseed and cardamom, and tap the bench twice whenever a line wandered.

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The cloth was for a wedding in Bradford, forty metres of voile, and the client had sent a drawing torn from an old Persian book with a note asking for it exactly. Kasim pinned the drawing above the bench and said the trick was never to copy the lines but to understand where the hand had hesitated. Paisley, he said, was only a seed that had learned to swim. I did not understand this until I had cut a border of stacked scallops and found my wrist had tired at the third corner, and that the tiredness had made the curve more alive, not less.

When the first proof came off the press, the indigo had bled a little into the grey along the left edge. Kasim lifted the cloth, held it to the window, and said nothing for so long that I began tidying the ink pots. Then he folded the corner back and pressed his thumb to the blur. 'There,' he said. 'That is where you were.'

He signed the proof with his small lotus mark and handed me the gouge. I still have it. The handle is worn pale where his grip used to sit, and I keep it wrapped in the same cloth as that first print, so the blur is always the first thing I see when I unwrap it.