Realism tattoo of a flintlock pistol with a black lace garter and teal bow, placed on the outer thigh, in mixed colour.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flintlock pistol and lace garter on a thigh

Realism · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A detailed flintlock pistol with an ornate silver lock and brown wooden stock rests across a black lace garter tied with a teal bow. The shading is smooth and highly modelled, giving the metal and wood a realistic three-dimensional look. Brown, grey, black and teal ink dominate, and the design wraps around the outer thigh against a brick wall background.

Realism Thigh Pistol Bow Ribbon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody pawned a flintlock with a garter round its grip, not in Bristol in the winter of 1791, so Abel Crane knew at once the girl had come a long way with it. She set the pistol on the scratched oak between his scales with the care you would give a sleeping cat. The silver lock plate had been polished until it hurt to look at, and a teal ribbon was knotted at the trigger guard, its bow pressed flat from being carried in a glove.

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"Four shillings," he said. "It's worth twelve to a collector and nothing at all to a hangman." She did not flinch. "It was my father's, and he was no thief. Keep the lace. I'll come back for the ribbon when the tide turns." He asked when that would be, and understood from her face that she meant the sea and not the clock.

He lent her the four shillings and put the pistol on a shelf above the ledger in the back room. Each evening he unknotted the ribbon to check the lock was dry, and each evening he tied it back into the same bow, because she had pulled it tight with two fingers and he could never manage it the same way.

The Falmouth packet came in on the twenty-second morning, and the mate brought a letter from the lieutenant at the Hotwells offering double for the pistol. Abel read it twice, then looked at the shelf for a long while. He wrote back that the item was not for sale, that a debt had been left open, and that a good pawnbroker never closes his books on a promise. Forty years later the ribbon was still tied on the stock, the bow worn soft as a moth's wing, and he still wound it fresh every Thursday.