Black and grey ornamental blackwork sleeve tattoo with spirals and fern-like motifs running from the upper arm down to the hand, shown against a white wall.

Ornamental sleeve tattoo on an arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman's arm is covered by a full sleeve of fine black ornamental linework, with spirals, scalloped fans, and fern-like leaf patterns. The shading is mostly solid black and grey, and the pattern wraps from the upper arm down to the back of the hand. The photograph is taken in strong directional sunlight against a plain white wall, with the bare back and black underwear visible in the frame.

Blackwork Upper arm Forearm Hand Mandala Spiral Ornament Sleeve Paisley

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The big top had lost its middle pole in Grantham, and since then Lorna Pike and I had been stitching it back together by hand, one panel at a time, in the lee of the last wagon. Lorna ran the wire. She had a rule that nothing went on the canvas until it had been drawn out in chalk on the grass, so we spent whole mornings on our knees in the wet, tracing spirals with a tin of marking powder while the rain got into everything.

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The fan panels were the worst. Somebody in the seventies had cut them from old sail and stitched a scalloped edge in black thread, and every seam had a habit of pulling. I learned to read the old work the way you might read a hand you didn't trust: which corners were tight, which had been done in a hurry by someone who was already leaving. Lorna said the pattern came from a dye-house in Leeds, and that her mother used to paint the ferns on the wagon doors with a brush and a bottle of ink.

On the last Thursday before the field was sold, the new owner's man drove up in a grey car and stood with his hands in his coat, looking at the canvas the way you'd look at a bill. Lorna didn't stop sewing. She kept going along the scallop, and the thread made a small sound each time it went through.

When he had gone, she handed me the needle. "Finish the spiral," she said. "Nobody will look at it from the road." So I did, stitch by stitch, bringing the curl in tight until it closed like a fist, and at the centre I left a knot the size of a pea, which is where the tent would hold when it was folded for the last time.