Black ornamental blackwork tattoo of paisley-like scrolls and scalloped borders covering a forearm and the back of a hand in dim light.

Ornamental blackwork on forearm and hand

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a person's forearm and hand, both covered in symmetrical black ornamental designs of scrolls, scallops and paisley-like motifs with a beaded border line. The linework is bold and even, with areas of solid black fill and fine stippling within the petals and curls, and the ink sits on pale skin. The arm is crossed over the torso against a dark background, with the hand raised near the chest and the head cropped out of frame.

Blackwork Forearm Ornament Paisley Scroll Filigree Mandala

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lacemaker's daughter had a rule about the iron gate at the bottom of the orchard: she never opened it after the bells, and she never let the goats through it, because the goats came back with their horns wound in silver thread. Her mother had taught her to count the scallops on every leaf before picking, so that she would know whether the tree had been visited. On the morning the frost came early, Ilse counted eleven scallops where there should have been twelve, and she went down the rows with a pair of shears in her apron.

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The missing leaf was on the far side of the wall, caught in the ivy of the old steward's garden, which had been empty since the steward walked into the river. Its veins ran in tight curls, like the spirals her mother pricked into the cuffs of the Sunday shirts, and there was a thread of black dew along the edge where a beaded border should have been. Ilse cut the stem clean and folded the leaf into her sleeve. Behind her the gate creaked, though the latch was still hooked.

She did not look round. She went home along the wall, and at the kitchen table she laid the leaf flat on the oilcloth and began to unpick it with a needle, slowly, the way you unpick a hem that someone else has sewn wrong. Under the first curl there was a second, and under that a third, all the way down to a small dark bud no bigger than a fingernail. When she finally pressed it with her thumb, the bud opened, and a grey moth the size of a coin climbed out onto her knuckle and folded its wings into a pattern that looked very much like a gate.