Black and grey realism tattoo of a lace garter with a shaded satin bow, wrapped around the thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lace garter and bow on a thigh

Realism · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A lace garter band encircles the thigh, with scalloped lace edges and small floral lace motifs filling the band. A large satin bow with soft grey shading and highlights sits at the front of the band, giving it a three-dimensional look. The work is entirely in black ink and greys, and the design fills the frame across the middle of the leg.

Realism Thigh Lace Garter Bow Ribbon Flower

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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

The lace came off the boat from Nantes in a crate that smelled of tar and lavender, and my mother spent three nights picking the paper out of it with a darning needle. She would not let me touch the good pieces. Those were for the Factor's wife, who paid in coins that rang like small bells on the kitchen table. What was left over, the torn scallops and the spoiled eyelets, came to me, and I learned to make a band from them by stitching each scrap onto a length of black cotton until it held together like a sentence.

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The ribbon was another matter. Nobody on Eriskay owned ribbon that was not already somebody's wedding. So in the spring I went down to the wreck at Coilleag Bay, where the Gaelic boys said a cargo of satin had gone under in the winter gales, and I waded out to my waist in water colder than a widow's heart. I found three yards of it wound round a broken hatch cover, grey as the sea and still soft. I tied it in a bow the way my mother tied my shoes, twice over, so it would not come undone on the path home.

When the Factor's wife came to fetch her pieces she found the old band hanging by the door and asked what it was for. I told her it was for a girl who was leaving on the Thursday boat and wanted something to hold her together in the city. She laughed and said that was a strange thing to sew for a stranger. I said it was only lace, and lace always held better when somebody else was wearing it.