Black and grey photo of an ornate floral tattoo with paisley-like motifs across the back of a hand and down onto the fingers, in a botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate floral design across the back of a hand

Botanical · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A hand is photographed palm-down on a grey surface, with an intricate black ornamental design covering the back of the hand and running onto the index and middle fingers. The design combines flower heads, leaves, scrolling vines and paisley-like shapes with fine, lace-like detailing. The image is black and grey, with soft even lighting that shows the fine linework clearly.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Mr Pell,

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Your order for the Ferrier pattern came back from the mill with the scrolls wrong again. The vine runs off the edge of the sheet where the paisley should turn, and the leaf that should sit above the bud has been drawn like a clenched fist. I have sent the sheet back with a pencil line through the error and a note that I will not draw it a fourth time for a man who cannot count his own petals.

Let me explain what I was doing on Tuesday, since you asked. Mrs Ferrier's daughter came to the back door with her grandmother's handkerchief, one corner worked in a fern-and-paisley border that nobody living can read any more. She wanted it copied onto skin rather than cloth, because her mother will not wear gloves in the chapel. I sat with the handkerchief under the lamp for an hour, tracing the vine with a hair-fine nib, and found that the old woman had hidden her own mistakes inside the flowers. Every bloom had one petal turned the wrong way. I have decided to keep them.

So the pattern is finished, and I am posting it to you on Thursday. Do not correct the petals. Thread the vine from the wrist down, let it climb the second finger, and leave the centre flower open like the mouth of a bell. The lace will look wrong on paper and right on the hand, which is the only sort of wrong I trust.

Yours in spite of everything, Edith Lowe

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