Black fine line paisley and lace-style tattoo across a woman's upper back and shoulder, with a row of red geometric cross shapes beneath it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Paisley lace and red geometric upper back piece

Fine line · Back · Mixed · Photo

A woman's bare upper back shows a large black tattoo of an ornate paisley and lace-like motif with dense fine linework, trailing swirls reaching over the shoulder and neck. Below it, a horizontal row of red outlined cross or stitch shapes runs across the back. The design is set against a plain red wall, with the ink crisp and the composition centred on the spine.

Fine line Geometric Back Shoulder Paisley Lace Mandala Swirl Cross Geometric pattern Floral ornament Back piece

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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

Pass me that lamp, love, and mind the cat, she's been sleeping on the bobbins again. You'll have heard Mrs Garrow sold her grandmother's wedding shawl to the man from Leeds who comes round with his van. Well, that shawl has been out of the door before. Winter of 1953, the beck frozen solid below Ferrow Cross, Ada Pell was carrying it up the hill to the chapel rolled under her arm when the wind snatched it clean off her and flung it into the hawthorns.

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Ada made lace the old way, pins stuck in a cushion and thread running over a dozen bobbins at once. The paisley on that shawl was a pear-shaped leaf she'd copied from a Kashmir scarf her husband brought back from the war, pinned to the kitchen wall so she could look at it while the kettle boiled. Tom never did come home from the signal box at Ferrow. The shawl was the last thing she finished before the frost, and she meant it for him to be buried in, though nobody could find him to bury.

When she got it back from the thorns it had three long tears and a hole the size of a hen's egg. She had no lace thread left to match, so she took the red cotton from her mother's old cross-stitch sampler and worked a row of little crosses along the worst of the damage, like a fence set against the weather. She didn't hide the mending. She said a thing that's been mended in the open has nothing to be ashamed of.

So when Mrs Garrow sold it, she sold the red as well, and the buyer will hang it on a wall in Leeds and never know why the crosses run where they do. Ada would have thought that was a fair price. Hand me your cup, and mind it's not too hot this time.