White floral lace design on the upper arm of a woman with tanned skin, with a white lace top and a red background.

White lace floral tattoo on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A close crop shows a woman's upper arm and shoulder with a white lace-patterned floral design of blossoms and leaves. The ink is pale white, so the design shows as light lines and shapes against the tanned skin rather than as black or grey shading. The raised arm, thin gold bangle and white lace top sit against a deep red wall, and the design is the main focus.

Botanical Upper arm Lace Flower Leaves Floral Blossom

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

Mrs Hester Vellacott kept the pricking card face down until the London man had finished his tea. He had come up from the railway at Honiton with a notebook and a silver pencil, and he wanted the blossom pattern copied before the autumn fair. She let him talk. Her forty pairs of bobbins lay in rows across the cloth, and each time the draught from the door reached them they clicked softly, like someone counting under their breath.

Keep reading

The pattern was older than the house. Her grandmother had pricked it from a sprig of blackthorn that grew against the church wall, then drawn the leaves out again and again until the cluster sat just so, five petals to a flower, the ivy curling out from the edges like a question. Hester had worked it for thirty years on fine thread, and every piece went out under someone else's name, sewn into a veil or a collar or a christening cap. Nobody ever asked who had made the stitches.

When she finally turned the card over, the London man bent close and squinted. Everything was right: the flowers, the spacing, the thin stems. He was already rolling it up when he noticed the single leaf at the lower edge, turned back on itself in a tight little loop that no sensible designer would draw.

"That one's a mistake," he said.

"That one is mine," said Hester, and she took the card back and slid it into the tin with the others, where it would stay, pale and unpriced, until someone thought to look for it.