Fine line or blackwork

We do two things here and people often arrive asking for one when their idea wants the other. It is worth ten minutes of reading before you send the enquiry.

Fine line is single-needle work: hair-thin lines, very little shading, a lot of white space. It looks like a pencil drawing on skin and it suits botanicals, small script and anything delicate. The trade is that thin lines spread slightly as they settle. A design with two lines a millimetre apart will, in ten years, read as one slightly thicker line.

Blackwork is the opposite trade. Solid fill, bold shapes, the design carried by the edge between black and bare skin rather than by line weight. It takes longer and it hurts more, particularly over ribs and the back of the arm. It also holds its shape almost indefinitely, because there is nothing thin in it to spread.

The useful question is not which you prefer the look of today. It is how small the smallest gap in your design is. If that gap is under about two millimetres, either scale the design up or move it to blackwork.

Rosa works between the two and that is often the answer: fine line for the structure, solid black for the weight, so the piece still reads from across a room.