Black and grey ornamental paisley tattoo across the chest beneath the bust, with a central point and scrolling motifs, shown with black bra cups above.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental paisley underbust tattoo

Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A large ornamental design sits across the chest below the bust, built from symmetrical paisley-style scrolls, lace-like petals and a central pointed motif. The linework is fine and even, with shaded fills and stippled dots giving the petals and scrolls depth. The tattoo is rendered entirely in black and grey ink against warm skin, and the composition is centred and mirrored on the midline.

Chest Paisley Scrollwork Ornament Lace pattern Floral motif Mandala

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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

Mrs Ivy Hallam had pricked patterns for the lace houses since she was eleven, and she knew the sound a pin made going through card, a small sharp tick like a clock that had lost its nerve. On the Thursday the new drawing came up from London, the foreman set it on her bench without a word and walked off, and she saw at once it was wrong. The scrolls curled inward on themselves like ferns that had been told to keep still.

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She spent the afternoon with the lamp pulled close, working out the pattern's middle. Every design she had ever pricked had a spine, and this one had a point at its crown, a single pointed motif rising from the centre like a church spire or a dropped needle. She tried it with a pin, then with a bodkin, and the gauze of the thing began to make sense. Dots for the stipple, a hundred to a petal, so the light would fall into the lace and come back shaded.

When the card was finished she took it to the window and held it against the sky, the way her mother had taught her. Both halves matched to a hair. Nobody on the mill floor would know who had made the centre true, only that it held. The foreman's boy carried the pattern down to the looms the next morning, and Ivy stayed at her bench a while, pressing her thumb to the last small hole and feeling the card give slightly, like something that would keep its shape for years.