Black lace-pattern bow tattoo centred on the upper back below the neckline, with a small line of script tattooed to the left.

Black lace bow on upper back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large bow is tattooed on the upper back, with its loops and trailing ribbon ends filled with a lace-like openwork pattern. The bold black linework and dense filled areas give it a crisp, graphic look. A small handwritten script line sits to the left of the bow against plain skin, and the image is shot close and straight on.

Blackwork Back Bow Lace Ribbon Script

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

Come closer, the rain's only stopping for the kettle, so you'll hear me over it. This is about Mrs Abernathy's bow, the one she wore on her shoulder at the Saturday market stalls in Hexham, pinned in black lace that she'd crocheted herself through a whole winter of fog. Nobody believed a bow could hold its shape without a wire, but she swore it was the knots that did it, each one tied the same way her mother had taught her.

Keep reading

Then the wind came off the river one March and took the bow clean off her coat. It went sailing over the fishmonger's awning and down into the gutter, where a boy with a barrow caught it on the tip of a broom. He held it up to the light and saw the ends had frayed into little hooks and loops, and he said, very politely, that it looked like a bit of wrought iron that had given up being heavy. Mrs Abernathy laughed so hard she had to sit on an upturned crate.

She never got the bow back in the same state. The rain had got into the threads and turned them stiff, so she unpicked the whole thing and began again, but this time she tied the loops larger and let the trailing ribbons fall lower, the way the river takes a stone. Some say the new one was finer. I say it was only bolder, and that she wore it until the day she moved to the coast, where the wind is worse.

So if you're passing the stalls this Saturday and you see a bow of black lace on somebody's back or coat, don't ask where they got it. Just nod, and let the weather do the rest.