Black lace-patterned bow tattoo on pale skin across the midsection, in a blackwork style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black lace bow tattoo on skin

Blackwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A large bow is tattooed in solid black ink with an openwork lace pattern filled with small floral and scalloped cutouts. The loops and two long trailing ends are outlined with bold edges and crisp shading, and the bow sits centrally against smooth, pale skin. The plain background keeps the focus on the design.

Blackwork Other Bow Lace Ribbon

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

The lock at Stoke Bridge had swallowed the Perpetua and most of Ada's patience by the time the rain came sideways off the cut. She sat on the cabin step with her mother's bonnet across her knees, picking at the black lace ribbon that had gone grey at the creases. Her father called it sentiment. He had called most things sentiment since the mill at Long Eaton shut its doors.

Keep reading

Elsie had made lace in the back room of a terrace there, bobbins clicking like a clock that could not settle on the time. Ada remembered the pattern better than her mother's face: scalloped edges, tiny flowers punched through so the light showed, and the way the ribbon always ended in two long tails that Elsie would drape over her wrist before stitching them down. Ada had meant to sell it at Lichfield market to pay for coal and the toll. Her knife was already open in her lap.

But when she ran her thumb along the inside of the left loop, a folded paper slipped out from a seam no wider than a fingernail. It was in her mother's hand, small and square, a list of the locks between the Trent and the Mersey, each with a note beside it. Beside Stoke Bridge it said: wait here, the keeper's dog is kind. At the foot of the page, in pencil, a single line: Tie it proper, Ada, and let the tails hang free.

Ada laughed until rain got into her mouth. She cut nothing. She tied the bow again on the tiller rail, looped and knotted the way Elsie had shown her, and let the two black ends trail down over the water while the gates groaned open ahead of them.