Shaded tattoo of corset lacing running down the spine with a bow at the base, placed on the lower back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Corset lacing and bow across the lower back

Realism · Back · Mixed · Photo

A tattoo of corset lacing runs vertically down the centre of the back, with crisscrossing cords drawn between pairs of eyelets. A large bow with a long trailing ribbon sits at the bottom of the lacing, where the cords meet. The cords are rendered with reddish-pink tones and soft grey shading, while the bow uses pale pink and grey shading to suggest volume.

Realism Back Corset Bow Ribbon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been coming off the canal sideways since eight, and the awning over my trestle sagged like a wet sail, so I was still rolling bobbin cord onto cards when the man from the lock-keeper's cottage stopped at the end of my row. He wanted lacing for his wife's stays. Not a bow, he said, just the cord itself, long enough to cross eleven pairs of brass eyelets and come out tidy at the bottom.

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I measured it against my forearm and then against the old pair he'd brought in a carrier bag, its ends furred and grey. "She's had these since the wedding," he said, turning the ribbon over in his fingers as if it might tell him something. I told him the trick was to cut the cord on the bias so it wouldn't fray and would ease through the holes without catching. He nodded like a man being handed a secret he had no use for.

I sold him the cord, and a loop of satin ribbon too, pale as skimmed milk, because I had cut too much and I hate waste. He paid in coins that smelled of the river. Two stalls down, somebody's radio was playing a dance tune badly through the rain.

The next Saturday he came back with the old pair finished and a new one for the trailing end, his wife's original bow folded into his coat pocket like something he meant to return. He didn't buy anything. He only wanted me to see the knot. It was tied so the loops sat as if they were holding a breath, and I thought, well, that is the only honest way to close a thing that has to come undone.