Black ink fine line and dotwork tattoo of an ornate flower with scrolling leaves on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate flower and scrollwork on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A detailed black ink tattoo of a stylised flower with a dotted, mandala-like centre and a small pointed bud at the top. Delicate scrolling leaves and tendrils extend from both sides and trail down towards the wrist. The design uses fine single-needle linework and stippled dots in shades of grey on pale skin, set against a dark background.

Fine line Dotwork Botanical Forearm Flower Mandala Scrollwork Leaves Dot Tendril

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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

The pattern came over on the Tuesday boat with the flour and the paraffin, rolled tight and tied with tarred string. My mother would not let anyone else open it. She said the paper had been kept in a tin in Glasgow for forty years and had to be laid flat on the kitchen table like a sleeping animal. Inside was a single flower drawn in ink, its centre dotted so finely that you had to lean close to count them, with two long tendrils trailing off the edges as if a stalk had been allowed to run out past the margin.

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Nobody on Eriska had made it in living memory. We made the usual things, collars and edgings for the mainland shops, but the flower wanted a finer thread and steadier hands than ours. My aunt Isla tried first. She pinned forty bobbins and worked until the lamp ran dry, then unpinned the lot and said the dots were wrong. They were not wrong. They were the stones between the jetty and the cairn at low tide, and she had miscounted because the woman who drew it had counted them in a different order.

I sat with the paper through a February gale and counted with my finger, stone by stone, while the wind leaned on the window. When I reached the end I understood the tendrils were the channels the tide cut through the sand, and the bud at the top marked the place a boat could be drawn up in a flat calm. It was a map, drawn by a woman who had wanted her daughter to find her way home in the dark.

I pinned the first bobbin on a Sunday. The lace came out grey and fine as breath, and when I held it to the window the light fell through every dot exactly where the stones lay. Isla cried and said nothing. Mother put the kettle on.