Black and grey fine line paisley ornament tattoo centred on a woman's chest between her breasts.

Paisley ornament tattoo on the sternum

Fine line · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A vertical ornamental design of paisley-like motifs, scrolls and dotted filigree sits at the centre of the chest. The linework is fine and uniform, with shading kept minimal so the pattern reads clearly. The black and white photograph is cropped below the chin and above the waist, with the subject holding open a bralette top and wearing rings and bracelets.

Fine line Chest Paisley Ornament Filigree Scroll Dot

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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 was Kashmiri, or so the drapers said, though Ada's father swore it was only a pear with ideas above its station. She sat at the bench in Sowerby's Yard with a magnifier strapped to her brow and a fine nib of Indian ink, copying a shawl the gentry had sent back for mending. Each teardrop had its curl and each curl its spur of dots, and the dots had to be even or the whole thing looked drunk.

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Mr Harrowgate from across the road wanted it scaled up for a wall hanging. He came in every Thursday, stood at her shoulder and breathed peppermint over the paper. "Symmetry is a kind of honesty," he said. She did not argue. She counted dots instead, forty-one down the central spine, and found that whenever she thought of her mother's hands she lost her place and had to begin again.

On the last Thursday he found a fault. One scroll curled the wrong way, and he said it had to be put right before he would pay. Ada took the original shawl from its paper, held it under the lens and showed him the same scroll in the same wrong turn. He frowned and went quiet. She had made that mistake herself, at four in the morning, the night her mother died, because the pattern had needed one thing to go wrong and she had not known how else to bear it.

He paid for the drawing without another word. Ada rolled the true shawl back into its tissue, tied it with string and put it in the drawer beside the ink, where the dots still ran in their perfect rows.