Black and grey tattoo of two laced boots hanging from a bow on the lower leg, in a traditional style with bold outlines and simple shading.

Laced boots with a bow on the leg

Traditional · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

Two lace-up boots hang from a looped bow, with long laces trailing between them. The outlines are bold and the boots are shaded in black and grey, with lighter highlights along the eyelets and tongues. The design sits centrally on the skin against a plain background with a soft, even light.

Traditional Calf Boot Lace Bow Shoe Ribbon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boots came to me on a wet Tuesday in February, knotted together by their laces and slung over the handle of a barrow, the way the carters bring in anything the road has finished with. Brother Wulf had carried them up from the gate. "Walked in the rain, these did," he said, "and the owner walked on to the chapel without them."

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I turned them over on my bench. The uppers were soft as bread, the eyelets furred green with the marsh, and the soles had worn through at the ball where a man pushes off. Someone had tied the laces into a bow at the top, a neat double loop, and the ends trailed long enough to brush the flags. Abbot Hugh did not hold with ribbon in a workshop. I cut the bow free, then found I could not bring myself to throw the lace on the fire, so I tied it back up again.

Three weeks later a young man came up the causeway with a letter from a bishop's clerk and asked for his boots by name. I told him they were mended, which was true of the leather and not, I suspected, of whatever had sent him walking in the first place. He sat on the step to pull them on and laughed at the bow. "My sister tied that," he said. "She swore I'd come back for them."

He left the laces trailing, the ends dragging through the mud of the path. I watched him go until one lace snagged on the gate latch and held, and the bow swung there in the wind like a small pale bird that had decided to stay.