Black lace-pattern tattoo band around the upper thigh, drawn in blackwork and dotwork style, with a bathtub edge visible behind the leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lace band tattoo on a thigh

Blackwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a leg with a wide band of black lace-like tattoo design around the upper thigh, its scalloped top edge ending in a fringed panel. The design uses bold solid black fan and petal shapes, fine hatched lines and stippled dots, with the shading kept in black ink only. The soft, slightly out-of-focus angle shows the skin and a bathtub edge behind the leg.

Blackwork Dotwork Thigh Lace Petal Band

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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

You kept the lace pattern in a tin on the windowsill of the shop on Tanner Row, where the light came in grey off the canal. Your grandmother had drawn it out for you on the back of a wallpaper sample when you were nine, fan shapes opening like the ribs of umbrellas, a scalloped edge that was meant to be turned over and sewn down. Nobody in the family had ever finished a band of it. They started and then the thread ran out, or the man came to collect the rent.

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The summer you were nineteen, you took the tin to a woman in Digbeth who worked with ink instead of bobbins, and she sat you on a stool with a bowl of cold water and told you to keep still. She did not ask whose the pattern was. She only asked where you wanted it to stop, and you said, halfway round, where the fringe came down like a hem, so the rest of you could go on moving.

It took three sessions. Between them you walked along the cut with the tin under your arm, looking at the boats and the children throwing bread at the swans, and you thought about how lace is only holes held together by careful pulling. By the last session the black had gone solid in the fans and sharp in the dots, and the woman wiped it clean and held up a small mirror so you could see the back of your own leg.

You bought a new tin that week and put the old one in the bin outside the chip shop. The wallpaper sample went in too. Some patterns are only meant to be carried, and you had finally found somewhere to carry yours.