Black ink ornamental paisley tattoo centred on the chest, in fine line and dotwork, shown in a black and white photograph.

Ornamental paisley tattoo on the sternum

Fine line · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A vertical ornamental motif of paisley-like scrolls, leaves and dotted accents runs down the centre of the chest, between the breasts. The linework is fine and black, with small dots used along the edges and tip of the design. The photograph is black and white, with the subject cropped below the chin and above the navel, and a navel piercing visible below the tattoo.

Fine line Dotwork Chest Paisley Ornament Filigree Scroll Leaf Dot Navel piercing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The silver wire had gone soft in the heat of the forge, and Maud Tregarthen cursed it under her breath while the fishing boats knocked against the quay outside. Her father's pattern book lay open on the bench, its corners furred with tallow. The drawing on the page was a drop shape, fat at the base and thinning to a point, its edges curled over like the heads of ferns. Her father had called it a pear, then a flame, then, in his last winter, a boat turned upside down. She had never settled on a name.

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She drew the wire through the draw plate a final time, then took up the tweezers and began to coil. Each scroll had to be rolled tight enough to hold its neighbour without solder, each leaf pressed flat with the edge of a bone folder so the light ran along it. Dots came last, tiny beads pricked into the metal one by one, until the design had something to say about the dark. Gulls cried over the harbour wall. A dog barked twice and gave up.

The commission had come from a woman who had sailed in on the Tuesday ferry with a folded photograph of a shawl her grandmother once wore. She wanted the shape in silver to hang over her heart, she said, and she wanted it to hang straight. Maud had found that the hardest part. Filigree wanted to curl. Every pendant she had made in twenty years had tilted a little to the left, as if leaning to hear something.

When she finished, she held the piece up to the window and watched the light slide along the curls. It hung true on the thread she had strung it on. She wrapped it in tissue, wrote the woman's name on the paper, and then, because nobody was watching, she sketched the same drop in the margin of her father's book, pointing downward, and added one last dot at the tip where the boat would keep its anchor.