Black ornamental tattoo of a stylised flower with dangling beaded drops and geometric panels, in dotwork shading, on the side of a person's ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental dotwork piece on the ribs

Dotwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a stylised flower or bud at the top, with a geometric lattice panel below it and a chain of dangling beads and drops hanging from the lower edge. The linework is fine and the shading is built up from stippled dots, giving the design a soft, textured look. The ink is black on skin, and the design runs vertically along the side of the torso, with a small dot cluster above it and striped fabric visible at the edges of the frame.

Dotwork Geometric Ribs Flower Mandala Bead Drop Lattice Ornament Chain

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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

You learn the chain first, because the chain is what the boats need most. Every spring Mrs Odell at the harbour office hangs a fresh strand of glass drops along the sea wall, one bead for each hull that went out and came back, and you are the one who threads them, sitting on an upturned crab pot with a needle the length of a finger. Your hands know the work better than your head does. The lattice goes next, a diamond net pinned to the wall's iron rings so the gulls cannot get at the bait sacks stacked beneath it.

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The flower is the last thing you cut, and it is the only part that is not for anybody. Your grandmother drew it for you on the back of a tide table the winter the Maud Ellen went down off the Dogger, and she said a bud on a wall tells the men which way home is. You have never once got the petals to open the way she drew them, so you keep trying, dotting each curl with the point of a pin until the paper goes soft.

In May the Ellen's brother came in on the morning tide with a hold full of mackerel and stopped at the wall to watch you work. He counted the drops with his finger, the way children count stairs, and when he got to the end he looked up at the empty ring at the bottom. You had left it open on purpose. Hang the last one yourself, he said, and he gave you a glass bead the colour of a dark bottle, warm from his pocket. You fixed it to the chain, and the whole length of it swung out over the water and back in the wind.