Black and grey paisley and ornamental tattoo wrapping around a forearm and wrist, shown from three angles against a black background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Paisley wrist cuff tattoo

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Three views of the same forearm and wrist show a band of paisley and ornamental scrollwork wrapping fully around the arm. The linework is fine and detailed, with soft grey shading filling the teardrop motifs and swirls. The tattoo is entirely black and grey, and the photographs are set side by side on a black background with a white border.

Forearm Paisley Ornament Scrollwork Swirl Floral 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, the lot of you, and mind the kettle on the stove, it's older than your father. Now. The Lark was tied up below Cropredy lock in the frost of 1887, her hold full of forty bales of grey merino, dyed in Banbury for a Manchester man who never paid on time. Ada Pell kept the books on that boat. She had a pencil behind her ear and a sharp tongue, and she could read a river the way other women read the Bible.

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One night the ice came down the cut in plates, grinding against the hull, and the mooring rope snapped. Ada went out in her nightdress with a lantern and a boathook. Her husband Sid was too drunk to stand. She walked the Lark back to the towpath by feel, cursing the whole way, and when she came in she was blue at the lips and laughing like a madwoman.

The next morning she took shears to the best shawl on the top bale. With a hot iron and a bowl of cold tea she pressed the frost-marks into the wool, one curl at a time, so the stains became teardrops and the cracks became scrolls. The Manchester man wrote to say the cloth was ruined. Ada sent back a bill at double the price, and he paid it, because nobody in Manchester had ever seen a cloth like that.

That's the pattern half the women in this county have worn on their wrists for a hundred years, and not one of them knows where it came from. Frost, lantern, and a woman who wouldn't drown. Now go on to bed.