Black ink tattoo of a dress form inside a birdcage-style lattice with ribbons and a small script line, placed on the side ribs.

Dress form and birdcage tattoo on ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo of a dress form wrapped in ribbons and set within a birdcage-like lattice, with a fleur-de-lis style finial at the top and curled scrollwork at the base. A small line of cursive script runs down the right side of the figure. The work is in black and grey with fine outlines and soft shading, shown in a close photograph against a plain background of skin.

Ribs Birdcage Ribbon Scroll Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, it's a wet one. Now, you want to know why the dressmaker's form stands in the window of the Corn Exchange, caged in wire and ribbon like a bird that thinks it's been given a present. I'll tell you, though the tale's older than the roof that's fallen in on it.

Keep reading

Mrs Ada Pemberton kept a shop above the fishmonger's on Tanner Row, and she had a dress form she called Mabel, cast from her own mother's bust and waist with the pins still rusting in the seams. Every girl in the parish was stitched into something Mabel had made, and every one of them came back complaining she'd been made to look like someone else. So Ada took a length of ribbon from every gown she'd ever finished and bound Mabel up in them, and then she wove a cage of brass wire round the whole, so the thing could be looked at but not measured.

When the frost came in December, a boy came up the stairs with a sparrow in his cap and asked if Mabel might be unbound, because the bird was tired of the wire. Ada laughed at him until she saw the sparrow was no bigger than a thimble. Then she unpicked one ribbon, only one, and let the bird go down through the gap.

Look at the scroll at the foot of her, curling out like a stopped clock's spring. That's where the ribbon ends, if you ever find the shop. Ada said that was the only true thing she ever sewed.