Black ink tattoo of the Golden Gate Bridge with a lace-style border across the outer thigh, with the bay and red bridge visible behind.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Golden Gate Bridge in lace on a thigh

Blackwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a black silhouette of a suspension bridge with towers and cables, set on a lace-like scalloped band that runs across the outer thigh. The linework is solid black with fine lace detailing and no grey shading. Behind the leg, a clear blue sky, a stretch of blue water and a distant red-painted bridge fill the frame, with the subject's hands and denim shorts visible at the top.

Blackwork Thigh Bridge Lace Skyline Water

Find an artist for this

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

"Keep your hands off the board, Dora, the pins are still warm." Vera Finch said it without looking up, because she had not looked up in nine days. The pattern lay pinned under the lamp, a band of scalloped lace as long as her arm, and worked into its fine mesh were two grey towers and a dip of cable she had drawn from a crossing she had never made.

Keep reading

The men at the yard had laughed when Tobias sent word that the bridge could not be woven. Too much iron, they said, too much sky. Vera bent over her bobbins anyway, twisting linen thread on a cushion stuffed with horsehair, and each evening the fog rolled in off the Gate, cold and white, and she sat at the window counting the holes in her work against the grey.

On the ninth morning she carried the band down to the quay and hung it from the rail of the ferry that her brother Lenny ran across to the far shore. The wind got into the openings and the lace filled like a sail. Dockhands stopped with their crates. Somewhere past the buoys a foghorn answered, and the mist threaded itself through the mesh, catching in every knot, until the whole bay seemed to wear a veil.

Tobias came home that week with rust on his cuffs and a new coil of rope. "The captains are steering by the fog," he said. "They say the Gate has never been so easy to find." Vera did not answer. She was already stitching her initials into the hem, small and black, beneath the nearest tower, where the cable meets the water.