Black and grey shaded tattoo of a bow over a lace garter band on the thigh of a person sitting on cushions.

Lace garter and bow tattoo on a thigh

Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded tattoo of a bow with a lace garter band wraps around the thigh. The bow has soft grey shading and fine dark outlines, and the lace band has a detailed, stippled texture. The skin is warm toned and the background is a patterned cushion, with the tattoo centred in the lower half of the frame.

Thigh Bow Garter Lace

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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

By the third bell the loom-house smells of hot wool and crushed oak galls, and you have already tied off eleven bows that Mistress Ilse will call crooked. Ilse keeps a trimmings stall by the Sea Gate of Alexandria, and she sells ribbon by the cubit to anyone with coin and a grudge against plain hems. Today you are working the lace band, a strip of bobbin work her cousin carried down from Antioch, pale as milk and nearly as fragile.

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You measure it against a clay cup, cut it with the bronze shears, and fold the loops the way your mother taught you in a village you can barely picture now: two loops, a crossing, a tuck underneath. The trick is to leave the tails long enough to lift in a draught. A bow that lies flat, Ilse says, is only a knot that has given up.

A carter arrives needing a gift for a wife who has been sharp-tongued since the flood season. He wants something to keep a sealed letter from creasing. You stitch a small bow in dark blue silk and bind it with a lace band, pinching the loops narrow so the thread barely shows. He pays in copper and asks whether the lace is real. You tell him every loop was made by hand, and that the hand is the only thing that makes lace worth more than thread.

When his cart has rolled out through the gate, Ilse lifts your bow to the window and turns it slowly, the way a jeweller turns a stone. She says it will do. You say nothing, and keep the crooked one from the morning in your sleeve, where the lace tails tickle your wrist all the way home.