Two black ornate cross tattoos with lace-like filling on the upper thighs, one on each leg, above black lace shorts.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate lace cross tattoos on both thighs

Blackwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

Two large gothic cross designs sit on the outer upper thighs, one on each leg, with the top of black lace shorts visible above them. Each cross has a bold black outline and a dense lace-like pattern inside, with a rose motif at the centre of the left cross and fine dangling chain lines on the right. The tattoos are rendered in black and grey with strong contrast against the pale skin, and the crosses are framed side by side against a dark textured background.

Blackwork Thigh Cross Lace Rose Chain Lace pattern

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

The lace came to Hester Vane in a parcel wrapped in brown paper, with a note from the vicar asking for it to be mended by Michaelmas. It was black bobbin lace, the kind her grandmother had worked in the back kitchen of the chandler's, and it had been torn clean through the middle of a cross. Someone had sewn the cross onto a length of cloth and then, rather than unpick it, had stitched a rose over the wound.

Keep reading

She sat under the lamp with the cloth across her knees and counted the threads. There were forty-one at the crossing and she could find only thirty-nine. The missing two had been pulled out, not broken, and when she held the rose up to the light she saw that its centre had been worked in a pattern she had never learned, the petals turning inward like a fist closing.

She did not sleep. Near three the chain of small brass links she kept in the drawer began to swing on its hook, though the window was shut and the sea lay flat. She followed the swing to the cloth and found the two threads on the table beside it, knotted together, still warm.

She finished the mend by dawn, woven the rose back exactly as it had been, and returned the lace to the vicar's boy with a single black thread tied round the parcel. It was the last thing she made in that town, for the sea took the chandler's roof that winter, and nobody in Saltcombe has been able to say why the rose on the altar cloth is always turned to face the door.