Black and grey photograph of two people seen from behind in lace underwear, showing bow tattoos on the thighs, two of them with skulls at the centre.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bow tattoos on thighs in black lace

Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of two people seen from behind, holding hands as they climb a staircase. Several bow tattoos are visible on the thighs, two with skulls at the centre and thin stems trailing down the leg, and smaller bows appear on the other thigh and near the upper back. The shading is soft and grey, and the dark lace underwear creates strong contrast at the top of the frame.

Thigh Back Bow Skull Lace Holding hands

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

I kept the ribbon shop at the top of Scarrow Steps, ninety-one worn stone stairs cut into the cliff above Pell Harbour. My mother had sold plain grosgrain to the fishwives. I sold them the black stuff with a fine wire sewn along the edge, so it would hold its shape in a wind off the water. By March the girls were coming up every Thursday with their hands joined, because the top step was always slick with gull fat and nobody wanted to be the one who went down first.

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Dora ordered the bows. She always wanted a skull set in the knot, grinning up from the loops like a sailor's joke, and I always tied them the same way: a stiff little bow pinned to a length of thread, the thread trailing down the lace. The men at the quay said the tails were foolish. Dora said they were the only part worth paying for, because a bow with nothing hanging from it looked like it had been left behind by somebody who had stopped caring where it went.

In October Winnie came up alone. She stood in the doorway with the wind pulling at her coat and asked for one bow, no skull, and the stem cut long enough to reach the floor. She didn't say who it was for. I didn't ask. Dora's ferry was the Tuesday boat, and I watched it from the top step that afternoon, a small white mark pulling away from the breakwater. Far out, on the rail, a figure in a dark coat was holding something up. It was too far to see clearly, but a thin black line hung from the hand and swung back and forth over the water, and I knew Winnie had tied the other end to the staircase.