Two colour tattoos of scrolling folk-style motifs, one on the side of the ribs and one on the upper chest near the collarbone.

Scrollwork tattoos on ribs and upper chest

Ribs · Colour · Photo

The top row shows two photographs of tattoos on skin: a navy and red scrolling motif with dots on the side of the ribs, and a green, blue and red flourish design on the upper chest near the collarbone. The lower row shows two animated film stills of costumed characters against red backgrounds, which are not tattoos. Both tattoos use solid colour fills, clean linework and a symmetrical folk-style composition.

Ribs Chest Scrollwork Flourish Dot Bud Leaf

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 chest had to be finished before the tide turned at Lerwick, so I painted the last scroll with the Svanhild rolling under my knees and linseed slopping in the tin at my elbow. Halvard held the lamp and told me I was crooked. I was not crooked. The ship was.

Keep reading

The pattern was my grandmother's, learned in a farmhouse in Telemark where every bride's trunk carried the same thing: two long navy scrolls rising from a point, curled at the tips like the ends of a fiddle, with red leaves pinned between them and three dots spaced like stitches. I mixed the navy from lamp black and a little Prussian blue, and the red from vermilion cut with oil. I had never painted it on a moving floor. She always said the trick was to let the brush do the counting. You don't look at the curl. You look at the dot beside it.

Halvard wanted a bud at the centre, a red one shaped like a closed flower, because his sister had asked for it. I told him the old patterns had no buds. He said his sister had never been to Telemark. In the gale off Fair Isle the lamp swung and the tin of red went over, so I finished the bud by feel, one hand on the rail and the other holding my breath. When I looked again the scrolls were still level and the dots still matched.

We reached Lerwick on the fourth morning. The chest went up the gangway on two men's shoulders, and a small girl from the quay ran her finger along the bud before anyone could stop her. The paint was still soft. It left a red whorl on her fingertip, and she held it up to show her mother. I stood on the wet planks and counted the dots again, three on each side, the same number my grandmother used.