Black and grey blackwork paisley and dotwork sleeve covering a forearm and upper arm, worn with a dark tank top.

Paisley blackwork sleeve on forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a forearm and upper arm covered by an ornamental paisley design with floral motifs, leaves and scrolls. The linework is bold and even, with fine stippled dotwork filling the bands and borders. The image is black and grey, with the dark tank top and soft shadows creating a moody composition.

Blackwork Dotwork Forearm Upper arm Hand Paisley Floral Leaves Scroll Dot Ornament Sleeve

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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

Sit yourself down, love, and move that carrier bag, it's the shawl I've been meaning to take to the menders. You want the proper version, not the one the lads tell on the stairs. Kestrel House, fourteenth floor, lift out of order again, and the whole block smelling of somebody's curry and somebody else's bleach.

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Mrs Dorota Wilk on the ninth floor had a shawl from her mother's village, black ground and every teardrop bent over at the top like a flame that's been told to behave. She kept it folded under glass in her front room, and only the boy from the flat below was ever allowed to touch it, because Kasim was eleven and had the steadiest hands on the estate for copying things.

He took a biro and a roll of lining paper and spent a whole summer on the stairwell wall between the sixth and seventh floors, one teardrop at a time, filling the borders with tiny dots the way the shawl did, one dot for every breath you took while you were concentrating. The council painted over it twice. Each time he came back with the same biro and started again from the corner, because you don't copy a pattern in the middle, you find where it starts.

Now listen, because this is the bit. When they finally got the lift going in March, Dorota's shawl was still under glass, and the wall was the only thing on the estate anybody looked at on the way up. Every landing, the paisleys bent the same way, toward the window, toward the lights coming on across the car park. Dorota said it was the best thing anyone had done with that stairwell in forty years. Kasim said nothing and went back to his dots. That's the whole of it. Mind the step on the way out.