Colour tattoo of purple and pink flowers with black lace and hanging feathers on a woman's shoulder and upper arm, in a botanical style with blackwork detailing.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Purple flowers and lace on a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo covers the shoulder and upper arm and combines large purple and pink flowers with a black lace pattern that spreads around them. Below, a dark strand of beads or chains hangs down the arm and ends in two shaded feathers. The flowers use soft shading and gradients, while the lace and chains are rendered in crisp black linework and fine dots, and the photo shows a black bra strap at the edge of the frame.

Botanical Blackwork Shoulder Upper arm Flower Lace Feather Chain Bead Dreamcatcher

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lace was the only thing Marta's mother would let her carry over the pass. Everything else went into the mule's panniers, flour and salt and the good knife, but the lace was folded small and tucked against her ribs under her coat, because the guards at the bridge had never once asked a woman to unbutton her coat in the rain.

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Her grandmother had worked the black thread into the shape of the purple mallow that grew along the ditches of their valley, petal over petal, until the flowers seemed to lean toward the light. Down one edge she had stitched a chain of small dark beads so the whole piece would hang and catch the eye. At the bottom she had knotted two feathers, one grey and one brown, from a jay that had flew into the kitchen the winter before and died on the sill. 'Feathers ask the wind to be kind,' the old woman said, and she did not explain further, because she never did.

At the bridge a tired guard named Ilie unrolled the bundle on a wooden table and found the flowers. He asked what they were for. Marta said they were for a wedding that had not yet been arranged. He lifted the beaded chain and let it run through his fingers, and the beads ticked together like rain beginning on a tin roof. He thought of his own sister, who had once sewn a veil in a village far from here and had never been allowed to wear it. He folded the lace back up and waved her on.

In a rented room in a town where nobody knew her name, Marta unfolded the lace and pinned it to the window frame. The purple had faded to pink along the edges from days of sweat and rain. The feathers turned slowly in the draught from the glass. By morning they had dried, and the chain had stopped swinging, and she could not have said which of them had carried her across.