Black and grey realism tattoo of a lace bow with shaded ribbon tails on the outer thigh, with denim shorts visible above it.

Lace bow tattoo on the thigh

Realism · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A large lace bow sits centred on the outer thigh, with a looped top, a central knot and two long trailing tails. The lace is rendered in black linework with fine openwork detail and soft grey shading that gives the fabric depth. The composition is set against plain skin, with the top of denim shorts visible at the top edge of the frame.

Realism Thigh Bow Lace Ribbon

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

The bobbins were still clicking when Mrs Abbott came up the lane with a skein of black thread wound round her fingers, and I knew from the way she set it on my table that the order had changed. She wanted a bow. Not a collar or a cuff, but a bow with a looped top and a knot at its centre like a jet button, and two tails long enough to trail across a floor.

Keep reading

I pinned the pattern to the pillow that night and worked by one candle while the owls went about Ashcombe Wood beyond the orchard wall. My mother taught me to read a pricking, but she never taught me to let the thread run ahead of my hands, and tonight it did. By the third hour the loops were built, the openwork blooming in small round holes, each one as dark as the gap under a hedge. I tied off the last tail at the grey edge of dawn and found the lace damp, though no rain had fallen.

Mrs Abbott came back at noon. She did not thank me. She lifted the bow to the window and turned it slowly, and I saw that the holes were not holes at all but places where the silk had been spun so thin it was almost air, the way a spider leaves its thread when it has finished with a web. Her face changed. She said her boy had worn a ribbon like this in his hair, and that he had walked into the wood last autumn after a thread of light he swore was leading him somewhere.

She paid me in coins I did not count. I walked her to the gate at the wood's edge and watched her tie the bow to the post, the tails spreading out over the grass. There was no wind, but they lifted all the same, slowly, towards the trees.