Photograph of a red and grey corset lacing tattoo with bows wrapping the thighs of a person lying on a white bed, with black sheer lingerie visible at the hip.

Corset lacing and bow tattoo on thighs

Thigh · Colour · Photo

The photograph shows two thighs, one partly overlapping the other, with tattooed corset-style lacing in pink-red ribbon outlined in grey. Each leg has a crossed lace pattern that runs down from the hip and ends in a bow near the upper thigh. The soft-focus background of a white bed and blurred room sits behind the legs, and the lingerie at the hip is black sheer fabric with dots.

Thigh Corset Ribbon Bow Lace Leg

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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

You have been selling ribbon from the same trestle on the Saturday market since the rain began at seven, and the awning sags in the middle where the water pools. The reels are stacked like cake tins: dusty rose, sugared pink, a bolt of grosgrain the colour of a boiled sweet. A man in a waxed jacket wants two metres for his niece's christening, and you measure it against your forearm the way your mother taught you, thumb to elbow, because the shop tape has been missing since March.

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Across the aisle, Ada runs the corsetry stall under a gazebo that her husband lashed down with bungees. Her ribbon never runs out, and it is not the ribbon. It is the crossing. She threads each pass through the eyelet below, then pulls, so the tension sits even all the way down like a net on a boat. Yesterday she made you practise on your own boot laces until the knots stopped slipping, and you tied the last bow with your teeth on the end, the way she does, though you swore you would never copy her.

At four o'clock a woman comes back with a lace torn clean through at the bottom eyelet. She says her sister told her to ask for the girl who ties bows at the end. You unthread the broken length, take the new pink from the reel, and work it up through the holes in the old crossing, hooking each pass and drawing it snug. The rain thins to a drizzle while you work. When you pull the final loop tight, the bow sits square against the wet tarpaulin, and you realise that you have stopped counting the crossings without noticing, and that your hands know the pattern now without asking you.