Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman in profile with rose and spider

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A woman's face in profile, with dark hair swept into a bun and a large red rose with green leaves tucked beside it. A small black spider hangs on a thin thread to the left, and grey web lines fill the background behind the figure. Bold black outlines, flat solid fills and a bright palette of red, green and black give the piece a classic traditional look, shown against plain skin and a light background.

Traditional Upper arm Woman Profile Rose Spider Web Hair bun Leaves

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 Ada Pell had counted the stitches on the veil three times before the bells started, and it came out wrong each time, one short in the border, as though a single thread had decided to go its own way. Outside the chapel on Lenton Road, the lace-makers' daughters were already lining the steps, their shawls pulled tight against the drizzle, waiting to see the bride walk out under forty yards of Nottingham net.

Keep reading

The veil had come to her from the old mill on Hollow Lane, where the frames still clacked through the night and nobody asked who had drawn the pattern. Ada had found the pattern pinned inside the cloth bag, a woman's face in profile, hair coiled high, a rose tucked behind her ear, and round her the fine grey web of a thing that spun for a living. Under it, in a hand she did not know, someone had written: she will hang the thread for you if you ask nicely.

Ada did not believe in such things. She believed in tension and in tallow lamps, and in the particular silence of a room full of working girls who had all, at some point, seen a spider drop from a beam on a thread and felt their hearts stop. So when the last hook slipped and she felt a tug at the hem, she did not look down. She looked at the bride instead, who was laughing, and she let the thread go slack.

At the church door the spider hung there in the light, small and black, turning slowly on its line. Nobody screamed. The bride lifted her chin, the rose in her hair catching the grey light, and the crowd of girls on the steps parted to let her through.