Black and grey ornamental floral and paisley tattoo covering the thigh and running down the calf of a leg.

Ornate floral lace tattoo down a leg

Fine line · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A large ornamental tattoo of flowers, paisley scrolls and lace-like panels covers the thigh and continues down the calf and towards the ankle. The work is in black and grey, with fine outlines and soft shading that give the motifs depth against the skin. The leg is photographed diagonally on a white sheet, so the design runs across the frame from top to bottom.

Fine line Botanical Thigh Calf Lace Paisley Flower Scrollwork Mandala Leg

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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

My mother's loom stood against the north wall of the courtyard in Kashan, and the master gave the fine knots to his daughter because nobody else had the patience for them. The commission was a prayer rug for a merchant in Isfahan. Paisley buds, lotus heads and panels of lace-thin lattice ran down the wool like a vine that had been told exactly where to go. I knotted eleven hours a day. The cotton wrapped around my fingers went red by noon, and by lamplight I could no longer tell which thread was blood and which was dye.

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The master's rule was that every bud must curl away from the border, outward, so the pattern seemed to lean toward the open door and not back into the room. On the last evening before the carpet was rolled, I tied one curl the wrong way, inward, tight against the wool. I saw it only after the lamp was lit. I could have unpicked the row, but my hands were shaking and the thread had already set, so I tied the next row as though nothing had happened and went to bed with my heart knocking.

The agent came from Isfahan with a brass lamp and walked the length of the carpet on his heels, slowly, the way men read contracts. He stopped at the inward curl for a long moment. My throat closed. Then he lifted the lamp higher, looked at the lattice beyond it, and nodded to the master. Weeks later a cousin brought word from the bazaar that the merchant's wife walked that carpet barefoot every morning before the household woke, and that she always paused at the same bud, turning her foot to follow its curl back toward the wall.