Black linework paisley motifs with small flower details running down a forearm, with a hand holding a phone at the lower edge of the frame.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Paisley tattoo running down a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A column of stacked paisley motifs with small five-petal flowers and fine leaf sprays runs from the upper forearm towards the wrist. The design is rendered in black ink with thin, even outlines and light internal hatching. The photograph is taken at an angle with the forearm filling most of the frame, and the background is dark and out of focus.

Fine line Forearm Paisley Flower Leaf Swirl Ornament

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

The winter the snow lay until Lady Day, Maud Ashby had three ewes, a lame cow and a shawl she would not sell. The shawl had come up from the coast in her grandmother's trunk, woven in dark wool with curled teardrops, each one bearing a stem and a leaf, and at the crown of every teardrop a flower of five petals. Men from Kirkby Hollow offered her coin for it at the Candlemas fair. She told them it was spoken for.

Keep reading

By February the hay was gone and the ewes were heavy. Maud wrapped the shawl about her shoulders each night and went out to the byre with the lantern, and each night the pattern seemed to have shifted a little further down, stacking itself like fleeces on a hurdle, the leaves curling towards her wrists. She slept badly. Her brother's boy came over the moor one dusk, saw the light in her window and asked after the shawl, and she told him to mind his own gate.

On the night of the hard frost she laid the shawl over the weakest ewe in the straw. The shapes lifted off the wool one by one, the way breath lifts off a full pail, and went out through the open half-door. In the morning the frozen beck below the farm was dotted with small five-petalled flowers pressed into the ice, and a line of leaves ran from the stone wall right up to the step. The ewe had twins, both living, and both born with a dark curl on the left foreleg.

The shawl hung folded on the nail by the door until April. Maud never wore it again, but the fringe had grown a leaf longer, and when the swallows came back she found a single black stem tucked into the hem, as neat as the day it was spun.