Black lace-style band tattoo with roses and fine script lines wrapped around the upper thigh of a woman in a black corset.

Lace band tattoo on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A woman in a black corset and black underwear stands with one hand on her hip, with the face cropped out of frame. A wide band tattoo encircles her upper thigh, with a lace-like pattern of roses and leaves between two bands of small cursive script. The tattoo is rendered in black ink with fine detail, against a plain light background.

Botanical Thigh Lace Rose Script Band Garter Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Agnes Pell kept the top room of the boarding house at Scarth Bay, and every spring she sat at its window with a pillow of bobbins and made lace for the women who could not afford to buy it. The roses she worked were always the same: five petals, a leaf on either side, the thread pulled so fine that the light came through. The old men said she could make a rose from a single hair if she had to.

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One March a stranger took the room below hers, a sailor's widow with a trunk full of ribbon and no intention of paying the rent in coin. She asked Agnes for a band of lace to go round her leg, above the knee, where a garter would sit. Agnes said she had never made such a thing. The widow said she had never asked for anything that was not meant to be worn, and laughed until the stairs shook.

Agnes worked it for nine nights. Between the roses she set two thin lines of script, and when the widow asked what they said, Agnes told her they were the names of every boat that had gone out from the bay and not come back, so that the sea would have to read them before it kept anything else. The widow did not speak for a long while. Then she tied the band on, snug, and went down to the harbour in the rain.

The boats came home the next week, every one, and no name was called from the quay that spring. Agnes kept her bobbins. The widow kept the band and never took it off, and when people asked her why, she said only that she had been handed a list and meant to carry it.