Ornate scalloped fringe design

Black and grey · Flash

A vertical design of layered scalloped panels at the top, filled with dense patterns of arches, chevrons and small motifs. Long, thin hanging lines taper downward from the panels to a point at the bottom of the frame. The fine, single-weight linework is dark brown-black on a plain cream background, with the design centred and filling most of the height of the image.

Scallop Ornamental pattern Lace Tassel

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lace order had to be in Halifax by Friday, and Marguerite had threaded the last bead curtain the night before, her thumbs gone numb from the wire. Her mistress, old Mrs Abernethy, held it up to the gaslight in the back room and said nothing for so long that the clock on the mantel ticked through two whole chimes. Then she turned it over, looked at the underside where the knots showed, and laughed. "You've hung it upside down, child. The scallops are meant to hold the weight, not the fringe."

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Marguerite felt her face go hot. She had worked from a pattern sketched on the back of a tram ticket, scalloped arches stacked like the roof of a hat box, each panel crowded with chevrons and tiny diamonds, and from the bottom of the panels she had let the long strings run down in ragged single lines. It had seemed right at midnight. Now it looked like rain falling upward through a window.

She unpicked it all that morning while the sparrows argued on the sill, and by noon she had a notion. Instead of fixing the thing, she made it into a doorway for the shop front, the strings tied off in a point so the whole piece tapered like a church spire seen from the pavement. Mrs Abernethy walked round it twice, then stood under the point with her head tilted. "Well," she said at last, "that's a thing people will walk under, isn't it?" The bell over the door rang as a customer came in, and the strings swung softly against her shoulder.