Black and grey tattoo of a bow with lace-like floral filigree and shaded ribbon tails, placed on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lace-patterned bow on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large bow is tattooed on the upper back near the shoulder blade, with its loops and trailing tails shaded to look dimensional. The inside of the bow is filled with fine black linework forming lace-like scrolls and small flower shapes, while the tails are shaded with soft grey gradients. The photograph is black and white and frames the tattoo centrally against pale skin, with the back of the subject's head and hair at the top edge.

Back Bow Ribbon Lace Flower Floral pattern Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sister Hilde had already unpinned the lace from its pattern card when the bell for None sounded, and she did not stop to fold it. Forty-one bobbins hung from the pillow like the tails of a kite, and the threads between them had to stay taut or the flowers would sag into the mesh.

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The commission had come from the bishop's office in March: a ribbon of lace, the width of a hand, to be wound around the reliquary of Saint Wenna for the feast. Hilde had wanted something plain. Mother Ysolde wanted scrolls and daisies, the way the sisters had worked them before the fire, so Hilde pricked the pattern, sewed the pins, and relearned the old tally of crosses and twists.

On the last evening she tied the finished length into a bow for the reliquary's shelf, looping the tails so the lace would fall loose and shadowed. Ysolde came in with her lamp, studied the bow for a long while, and said nothing about the scrolls. Instead she asked who had taught Hilde to make a loop that stood proud of the cloth.

"My mother," Hilde said. "She sold ribbons at the fair in Lynn before she came here to be quiet." Ysolde touched one of the flowers with a bent finger. "Then Wenna will have a bow that remembers its maker," she said, and went to snuff the candles, leaving Hilde to watch the lace take the lamplight, its shadows grey as rain on the stone.