Black ink paisley and floral ornamental tattoo on the outer thigh, with fine linework and dotted shading, photographed in black and white.

Paisley ornamental tattoo on the thigh

Dotwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A large symmetrical paisley design with floral motifs and a central teardrop panel covers the front of a thigh. The work uses dense black linework with stippled dotwork fill, and the pattern tapers at the top and bottom of the panel. The black and white photograph is taken against a dark background, with a hand resting on a dark skirt at the top of the frame.

Dotwork Thigh Paisley Floral Ornament Teardrop Mandala Pattern

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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 down by the lamp, child, and don't touch the warp, because the pattern is still half in my head and one wrong pull will send it crooked. You know the shape I mean. It starts as a seed at the bottom, swells into a teardrop, and then the flowers climb up its spine as if someone had pinned a little garden onto the cloth. Your great-grandmother called it the flame, the men in the bazaar called it the cypress, and neither of them ever sat at a loom for forty days straight.

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In the late summer my son came up from the orchard with apricots in his shirt and said the river had taken the lower terraces. The merchant's daughter was to be married before the snow, and the shawl had to be finished before the caravan left. I told him to bring me the blue dye from the jar and the red that looks like dried blood, and then I told him to go and eat something, because a man who worries on an empty stomach will pull the threads like a fool.

That night I sat with the old drawing and found the mistake. The paisley had been copied so many times that the dots had shrunk smaller than the needle could hold, and the teardrop had lost its breath. So I unpicked nine rows by lamplight and wove the dots back in one knot at a time, the way blossom finds its way back to a branch after frost. When the merchant's man came for the shawl, he turned it under the light and asked where the pattern ended.

It doesn't, I told him. That's the point. I left the top open so the wind can get in.