Black and grey ornamental tattoo on the neck and upper back, with symmetrical fan and floral motifs, dotwork shading and dotted arcs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental neck and upper back piece

Blackwork · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo covers the neck and upper back with a symmetrical ornamental design of fan-shaped motifs, flowers and a central pointed panel. Solid black areas sit alongside fine dotwork shading and lace-like linework, with dotted arcs falling across the lower part of the composition. The black and white photograph shows the subject from behind, with hair in a bun against a plain pale background.

Blackwork Dotwork Geometric Neck Back Mandala Fan Shell Flower Lace Ornament Dot

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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

By the time the bells at Hollin End had rung for vespers, you had already pricked out forty-one holes on the pattern pillow, and the pins were winning. Your aunt would have called that impatience. She sat by the window with her bobbins clicking like a small hard rain and said nothing, because the forest edge was already dark, and lace made in bad light always came out crooked.

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The pattern was one nobody in the village would copy: a fan of scallop shells opening from a point, flowers stacked above them like a crown, and beneath it all a fringe of arches that dropped toward the hem in strings of dots. Your grandmother had drawn it on the back of a tithe receipt the winter the lime trees came down. She said the wood knew it. Each dot, she said, was a place where a thread had been allowed to rest.

On the last night of the thaw you carried the finished length past the stile to the clearing where the old woodcutters left their offerings of bread and thread. A fox watched you lay it across the stump. The lace caught the moonlight in its open spaces, and where the shadows of the fans fell over the moss it looked as though someone had stitched the ground itself. You waited, feeling foolish, the way you had as a child at the pond.

When you came back the next morning, the pattern pillow had been turned to face the window, and beside it lay a single bobbin wound with thread you did not recognise, silver as frost. Your aunt said nothing about it. She only handed you the pins and told you to start with the arches, since they were the part that would hold everything else together.