Black fine line tattoo on a forearm showing a typewriter-style quote above an ornate corset on a stand, with denim visible in the background.

Quote and corset dress form on forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm carries a black typewriter-style quote reading "If God gave me grace then why aren't I graceful?" Below it, a corset is drawn on a stand with fine, scrolled ornamentation along its seams and base. The ink is black and the lines are thin and even, set against pale skin and a blurred denim background.

Fine line Forearm Quote Corset Scrollwork Denim

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mum said grace was a thing you were born with, like a good chin, and that corsets were only ever a fair imitation of it. She made stays for the ladies of Hebden Bridge for thirty-one years, and I learned my seams at her elbow in the back room where the gas fire ticked. The dress form stood in the corner by the window, a headless cream thing on a cast-iron foot, and it was the only one of us who never complained about the boning.

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When she died I carried the form out into the garden, because the back room smelled of her and I could not sit in it. I pinned it to the wall between the runner beans and the leaning pear, and every morning I went out with my tea and told it what I had done wrong the day before. The corset I was building for Mrs Ackroyd's daughter had a ribbon that puckered at the busk. The scrollwork along the base kept coming out lopsided, though I had traced it three times.

Mrs Ackroyd came to the gate on the Thursday, in a coat too thin for October, and asked me straight out whether I thought her girl would be graceful in it. I said grace was not the frock's business. She laughed so hard she had to hold the gatepost, and then she told me her own mother had said the same thing about stays, that they were a promise you kept for other people.

I unpicked the ribbon that evening and sewed it again, straight this time, and left the form out in the rain to see what it would do. It did nothing. It just stood there, dripping, the way Mum would have wanted it to.