Black and grey back tattoo of corset lacing with leaf scrollwork over the shoulder blades and swirling flourishes on the lower back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Corset lacing and leaf scrollwork across a back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman's bare back, with her face out of frame, shows a large tattoo of corset lacing running down the spine. Leafy scrollwork frames the shoulders, and swirling, feather-like flourishes extend over the lower back and hip. The shading is soft grey with dark outlines, and the design fills most of the frame against a dark red background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The seam had puckered again, and Nell Corrigan swore at it under her breath before the mate could hear. Eighteen days out of Liverpool and the mainsail of the *Thessaly* had taken on the look of a tired horse. She sat on an upturned cask in the lee of the galley with the canvas across her knees and a palm thimble on her middle finger, working the lacing through the eyelets the way her father had taught her: cross over, cross under, pull until the cloth gave.

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Her father had sewn sails for forty years in Whitby and never once let her near a needle on anything that mattered. "Lacing is the honest part," he used to say. "Anyone can make a seam look pretty. A lace tells you the truth of the whole thing." Now he was in a churchyard above the harbour, and she was the only sailmaker aboard who could make the old canvas hold.

The bosun came down the ladder at dusk, looked at the sail, looked at her hands, and said nothing, which from him was a kind of praise. Nell tied off the last crossing and ran her thumb along the ridge of the lace, feeling the tension travel down its length like a rope taking weight.

Then the wind backed round to the north-east, the sail filled with a crack like a musket shot, and she held her breath until the seams held. Nobody on deck looked up. She found she was smiling at nothing, watching the stars wheel over the mast, and for the first time since the funeral she felt the cloth was hers to keep.

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