Black lace-patterned bow tattoo across the upper back with a small script line on the left side.

Black lace bow across the upper back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large bow is tattooed centrally on the upper back, with its loops and trailing ribbons filled with open lace-like patterns in solid black ink. A thin, small script line sits to the left of the bow, and the skin shows a smooth, even tone around the design. The tattoo is shown in black ink only, with the subject photographed from behind.

Blackwork Back Bow Lace Script Ribbon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lace came out of my nan's wedding veil, folded in a cardboard box that smelled of camphor and cold tea. I was twenty-two and my car had a cracked sump on a blacktop road south of a town called Tuller Wells, where the nearest signal was a rumour. The only thing open for miles was a diner with a hand-painted sign and a man named Obed who fixed boots at the back of the counter.

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He took the scrap of veil from me while I waited for the coffee to go stale. He held it up to the window, where the sun came through the open holes in the pattern like light through a colander. 'Lace is just holes that agree to hold hands,' he said. 'Out here there's a great deal of hole and not much hand.' I didn't know what he meant, so I asked him to fix the strip of ribbon that had frayed at the end, and he did it with a needle no thicker than a hair.

When the car was running again he wouldn't take money. He tied the ribbon into a bow and pinned it to my rear-view mirror with a safety pin, and the black lace shook gently every time the tyres hit a seam in the road. I drove on with the windows down, and the dust came in and settled on the bow like it had always meant to stay there. Somewhere past the salt flats I stopped looking at the road and started looking at the bow, and I drove the rest of the way like that, holding the thing my nan had worn, and finding it held me.