Black ink drawing on paper of an ornamental lace-style tattoo design built from scalloped petals, dots and a pointed drop, with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental lace-style tattoo design with dangling drops

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink line drawing on textured paper shows an ornamental design of stacked scalloped petals, each with concentric circles at its centre. Fine lines, dotwork and chains of dots hang from the lower edge, ending in a pointed leaf or feather shape. The design is entirely black on a pale background, and a partial second motif is cropped at the lower left.

Dotwork Lace Mandala Petal Circle Dot Chain Leaf Ornament

Find an artist for this

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 inspector had already unpicked both hatboxes when he reached my lap, so I kept my hands still on the cardboard and let him look at my face instead. Aunt Odile always said a story goes down easier when the teller is tired. I was tired enough for two.

Keep reading

Beneath the tissue lay the collar my mother had worked through the wet winter at Bruges. Stacked scallops rose from the neck like the tiers of a small fan, and each one held a wheel of tight thread at its centre, rounds within rounds, pinned so fine that you could not tell which bobbin had made which curl. From the lower edge hung a fringe of chains and knotted dots, and at the very end a single pointed drop, shaped like a leaf, that swung whenever the carriage moved.

He lifted the collar on two fingers. The drops swung and clicked faintly against one another, and he went quiet in a way I did not like. Then he turned one wheel of thread towards the window with his thumb. 'My grandmother made these,' he said. 'Same rounds, same way of ending the leaf. She taught me to count them before I could read.' He looked at the tissue, then at me, and laid the lace back down with more care than he had shown the hatboxes.

He stamped nothing and wrote nothing. Outside, the train whistled for the bridge over the Bidassoa, and I watched the lowest drop of the collar hang over the edge of the box, catching the last of the light, while the river slid on below us towards the sea.