Black and grey ornamental scrollwork tattoo with a bottle-like motif on the chest beneath the bust, shown with a black bra partly lifted by a hand.

Ornate scrollwork tattoo below the bust

Chest · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is a symmetrical ornamental design of scrolling foliate forms rising to a central bottle-shaped motif with a decorative band and fan-like details. It uses smooth grey shading and fine dark outlines, with light highlights giving the scrolls depth. The design sits centrally on the chest below the bust against pale skin, with a black bra in the upper part of the frame.

Chest Scrollwork Filigree Ornament Bottle Leaves Symmetrical design

Find an artist for this

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

You take the bottle from Mrs Ashdown's kitchen shelf the morning the frost comes off the beeches, because she asked you to and nobody else in Hollin Bottom will climb the path to the charcoal burners' huts. The stopper is pewter, shaped like a church spire, and the liquid under the glass is the colour of weak tea. It knocks gently against your hip as you walk.

Keep reading

The path narrows where the holly closes over it. Along the bank the bracken and bramble curl and double back on themselves, drawn in the same fine lines as the carving on the stopper, the way things grow in a lane nobody has cut for years. At the huts a man named Tobias Reeve takes the bottle without thanking you. He turns it to the light, runs a thumb over the scrolled band below the spire, and says his father cut that pattern the winter before the flood took the mill.

He unscrews the stopper, sniffs the tea, and pushes it back down with the heel of his hand. Then he presses a tin of pennies into your palm and tells you the mill wheel will turn again by midsummer if the water holds. You do not ask what he means. You are not sure he knows.

Going down, the holly lets you through and the valley opens below you, with the grey roofs of the village and a thin white thread of water where the old race used to run. The bottle is warm against your ribs from being carried. Somewhere below, a wheel creaks round for the first time in years.