Black ornamental scrollwork tattoo across the ribs below the bust, with a central floral motif and hanging swag details.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental scrollwork tattoo below the bust

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A symmetrical black design of scrolls, flourishes and a central floral motif sits across the torso below the bust. The fine, dotted linework is solid black with no shading, and the image is entirely monochrome. The composition is centred, with a grey top pulled up above the design and a hand resting on the chest at the upper edge of the frame.

Ribs Ornament Scrollwork Floral Flourish Pendant Lace

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

Marta Kettering had been told the gate would take a fortnight, which was what everyone said about old iron. Rain had worked into the hinges of Corrie Hallow's west gate, and the scrollwork had rusted to a crust that flaked onto her gloves. She worked from a plank laid across two barrels, the roofless hall open to the sky behind her, rooks quarrelling in the broken window tracery.

Keep reading

The pattern was the problem. Half the swags had snapped away, and the surviving flourishes curled into a central rosette with a heart-shaped boss at its centre, dropping three pendant loops to a single teardrop. Nobody had a drawing. The estate ledger said only 'gate, as before'. So she scraped back the rust with a wire brush and traced what the iron still remembered, mirroring left to right until the design closed like a pair of hands.

On the ninth day the lodge keeper, Dougal Reith, came up the track with a flask and a folded sheet from 1911. A pricing list for ironwork, and in its margin the same design drawn freehand, with a pencilled note: 'Copy the lace, not the iron. The iron was never straight.' She laughed until she coughed. The smith had copied a Brussels collar his wife wore to church, and the gate had been lace all along.

She finished the last pendant at dusk, when the light slid sideways through the arch and laid the shadow of the scrolls across the gravel like ink spilled on a page. She left the hinge unpainted, and let the rust keep its place.