Close view of a pale, white-ink style scrolling filigree tattoo across a bare shoulder, upper back and upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pale swirling filigree on shoulder and arm

Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The image shows a bare shoulder, upper back and upper arm with a large ornamental design of scrolls, swirls and curling tendrils. The linework is fine and pale, appearing as a light, raised-looking pattern with little contrast against the skin, which suggests white ink. The design is in a single tone with no colour, and it wraps over the shoulder point and down the outside of the arm against a plain grey background.

Shoulder Upper arm Back Scroll Swirl Filigree Tendril Ornamental

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Pascoe had pricked the pattern onto the parchment card the winter her mother's eyes went, and by March she could work the whole sheet without looking. The pins went in along the lines like tacking holding a hem in place. Honiton lace was never made in one piece. Each sprig was worked on its own cushion, then joined with a thread so fine it vanished, and the buyers in Exeter swore they could not find the seams.

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Her mother sat by the window with the cushion in her lap, bobbins clicking, saying the names of the stitches under her breath as if they were saints. Sprig, tally, ground, fond. Nell had heard them all her life. What she had not heard was the man from the mill at Feniton asking for a pattern no one had worked in forty years, a scroll that curled back on itself and kept coming out from the stem like a fern unrolling in frost.

She drew it out for him in ink first, then pricked it, then worked it over six weeks with the candle guttering at the foot of the bed. When it was finished her mother ran a thumb along the tendrils and said nothing for a long while. Then she said the pattern was wrong, that the curl went the other way, and Nell laughed until she had to sit down, because it had been wrong on the card for a month and neither of them had noticed until the lace was made.

The mill man took it. He never asked where the mistake had come from, and Nell never told him. Some nights she still sees the piece on a shop wall in Exeter, pale as milk, spiralling up toward a window nobody has opened.