White ink lace-style ornamental tattoo with scrolls and a small flower across the centre of the chest, with hands with dark nail polish at the top edges of the frame.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

White ink lace design across the sternum

Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A white ink tattoo of an ornate lace-like design sits across the centre of the chest. It is built from scrolls, leaf shapes and a central medallion, with a small flower at the base, all in fine raised-looking linework and stippled fills. The skin is pale and softly lit, and the design is centred in the frame with a pair of hands with dark nail polish holding the upper edges.

Chest Lace Ornament Scroll Flower Leaf Medallion

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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 yourself nearer the peat, for the wind on this side of Unst takes the words out of a body's mouth if you let it. My grandmother's mother could make the white lace, the fine kind the Lerwick ladies paid for by the yard, and she learned it sitting at the window every winter with a straw pillow and forty pins while the men were away at the ling grounds.

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When the boats went out she would set a pattern: scrolls like the swell coming in, leaves for the kelp, a medallion in the middle for the light on the Skerry. At the foot she worked a little five-petalled flower, for the stone wall where the washing was hung. She never wrote any of it down. Paper goes soft in the damp, she said, but thread remembers the hand that made it.

The winter the Mary Ann failed to come round the point, she sat with the pillow in her lap and worked the medallion without stopping, from dusk until the grey light came up off the water. When the boat finally limped in on the next tide with two men aboard and one missing, she had finished the last loop. Nobody asked her to explain it. The men took the cloth and pinned it to the drying line, and in all that salt air the white thread never yellowed.

Every spring after, the lace came down and was folded in tissue paper, and every spring the medallion caught the first sun off the sea like a lamp left burning in a window. That is all of it. Mind the step on your way out, it is slippery with the spray.