Black and grey photograph of a lace-style garter band tattoo on an upper thigh, with a loose top held up beside it.

Lace garter tattoo on upper thigh

Blackwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a black ink band tattoo around the upper thigh, made of a fine mesh strip above a scalloped, lace-like border with a fan-shaped motif. The linework is crisp and even, with solid black areas and open negative space. The image is black and white and the composition is cropped at the hips, with a plain bedroom in the background.

Blackwork Thigh Lace Garter Band Scallop

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

Aunt Hattie pricked the pattern onto card with a pin as long as a hatpin and told me the fan was the hardest part, because it had to open the same on both sides or the whole band would sit crooked. I was twelve. My fingers were grey from the dust that came through the sill whatever we stuffed in the gaps. Our end of Harrow Row had three pits' worth of men coming up black at the end of each shift, and not one of their wives could afford lace.

Keep reading

The net frames in town had shut in the spring, so we worked by lamplight on the pillow in the front room, a hundred and twelve bobbins clacking against each other like teeth. The mesh came first, small diamonds twisted tight enough to hold a thumbnail's worth of weight. The carrier's cart brought the orders up from Nottingham on Tuesdays, and that winter one of them asked for a band of lace no wider than a hand, scalloped along the bottom, with a fan in the middle of it. The draper wrote that it was for a lady who liked things to be neat.

Hattie died in February, with her hands still on the pillow. I finished the band alone. When I unpinned it, the left fan leaned a hair towards the window and the right one stood straight, so I unpicked the whole border and started again, wetting the thread on my tongue to keep it from fraying. The cart took it down on the Monday, folded in tissue paper. I kept the card with its pinholes, because a fan is only true once you have pricked it twice.