Black lace-style butterfly and floral garter tattoo in fine linework on a woman's thigh, beside a sheet of matching design stencils.

Lace butterfly garter tattoo on a thigh

Fine line · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A woman in a black skirt and tan heels is shown from the waist down, with a black lace-patterned butterfly band tattooed around her upper thigh like a garter. The linework is fine and detailed, with open wing panels and scalloped edges, and the ink is solid black against pale skin. The right side of the image shows a sheet of similar black lace butterfly and floral band designs on a white background.

Fine line Thigh Butterfly Lace Floral Garter Stencil

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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

Mind the step, that's the loose board by the door, and it has been loose since my grandmother's time because everybody likes the knock it gives when they come in out of the wind. Now then. You want to hear about the butterfly. Every lace-minded girl on the mainland asks for the butterfly, so sit by the range and I'll tell it the way it was told to me, with the bobbins clicking the whole way through.

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There was a lacemaker on Inchmara called Ailsa Tulloch, who sat at her pillow from first light until the lamp oil ran low. She worked with forty bobbins and pricked her patterns onto card with a pin, and she never once copied a pattern from anyone. The merchant wanted edgings for his wife's petticoats, scallop after scallop of plain flowers, and she made them, but in the evenings she made a butterfly. Its wings were two open panels, each a window of holes the wind could pass through, and its body narrowed to a waist no thicker than a knot in thread. She used linen so fine it snapped if the damp got into the room.

The winter the boats did not come home, she sat up every night with the butterfly. She could not sleep, and her hands had nothing else to do. Each pin she set was a day counted off without a word from the sea. By February she had a band of butterflies long enough to wind twice around the merchant's wife's waist, and he carried it across to the mainland in a tin box lined with sacking.

Years later a parcel came back to the pier, addressed in a hand nobody on the island knew. Inside was the band, mended in three places with thread that did not match. Underneath it was a card with a single pinhole through the last scallop. Ailsa had left that scallop open on purpose, so the butterfly could fly off the cloth when it was ready.