Realistic shaded tattoo of a lace garter with a bow and trailing ribbons on the outer thigh, with denim shorts above.

Lace garter with bow on a thigh

Realism · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A tattoo of a lace garter wraps around the upper thigh, with a bow at the front and two long ribbon ends hanging down. The bow and ribbons are shaded in soft greens and pale tones to suggest satin, and the lace edging is drawn in tan and cream. The photo is taken close up with denim shorts at the top of the frame and a dark background.

Realism Thigh Garter Bow Lace Ribbon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Dorothy Cale had the lace off the bobbin by half past eight, and by nine the ribbon was cut and the sage green satin was pinned to the board in long strips. The order was a garter, nothing grand, for a Saturday wedding at St Peter's, and the bride's mother had been clear about the colour. Sage, she said, because it was the colour of the bay in February, when the light went flat over the water and nobody could tell the sea from the sky.

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Dorothy tied the bow the way her own mother had taught her, two loops, a pinch at the middle, then the tails cut on the slant so they would not fray. She wound a length of cream Calais lace along the elastic, gathering it so it sat soft rather than tight. The bow took the longest. She kept folding and unfolding it until the sheen caught the lamp the way satin should, and only then did she stitch a single seed pearl at its centre, from a card she had been saving since the war.

On the Friday the bride's sister came in, a girl of about sixteen with ink on her fingers, and asked whether the garter could be made to look older. Dorothy looked at her over her spectacles and said that nothing in a shop like this grew older on request. Thread came with a story, she said, and the story was in the stitches. The girl laughed and paid in coins, counting them twice.

The wedding was the Saturday. Dorothy did not go, but the sister came back the week after with a jam jar of blackberries and a photograph in which the garter showed beneath a blue dress, a green flicker at the hem. The pearl was gone, the sister said, lost somewhere between the church steps and the car. Dorothy said that was the pearl's business. She took the blackberries, and in the order book she wrote the date beside the words sage, lace, one bow, and no charge.