Black lace-patterned bow tattoo on the upper back, with a small fine script line to the left, in blackwork style.

Lace bow tattoo on upper back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large bow is tattooed centrally on the upper back, with its loops and trailing ribbon ends filled with a lace-like pattern of open motifs and dotted edges. A small, thin script line sits to the left of the bow. The tattoo is rendered in solid black ink against pale skin, with the photo showing the back of a person's neck and shoulders from behind.

Blackwork Back Bow Lace Ribbon Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain has got into the north tower again, so I am writing this on my knee by the last of the candle, with the ink gone thick in the cold. Mrs Abernethy has the black silk out for the chapel hangings, and I have spent three days at the window making the same small windows over and over, one pin for every point of the edge until my fingers ache like rope left in a bucket.

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You will laugh, but I have finally got the bow right. The trick is the tails. They must trail longer than the loops, or they look like two drowned moths. Mrs Abernethy said I would never get them to hang, so on Thursday I pinned a whole bow to the stair lintel and let the draught from the courtyard work it loose. It stirred all afternoon like something breathing.

The old lady died on Tuesday, before the hangings were finished, and nobody has asked for the bow since. This morning the steward's boy came up and took it down, folded in a handkerchief, and carried it out through the gate to the carriage without once looking at me. I stood at the window and thought of you, and of the market stall in Morpeth where you used to sell our ribbons for a penny a yard.

I have kept one back. Do not tell Mrs Abernethy. I have tied it round the broken latch of the north casement, where the glass has gone and the wind comes in off the sea. Every time it gusts, the tails lift and knock against the stone, and I hear the bobbins ticking in the dark like someone counting. I think I shall leave it there until the spring.

Your loving sister, Ada