Traditional style tattoo of a glossy red bow on a grey lace garter band wrapped around the thigh, with a red stripe along the band.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red bow garter tattoo on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A tattoo of a garter band with a glossy red bow at its centre, with a thin red stripe running along the grey band. The grey lace-like edges are shaded in soft tones. Bold black outlines and smooth red and grey shading give the piece a clean, classic finish on the skin.

Traditional Thigh Garter Bow Ribbon Lace

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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 rain has found the gap in your awning again, so you shift the trestle an inch and set the tin of ribbons where the drips won't reach. Before you've unrolled the tarpaulin a woman is already at the edge of the stall, holding a length of grey lace up to the light as if it might tell her something. She has come every Saturday since March, and every Saturday she asks for the same thing without quite saying it.

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'The stripe,' she says at last. 'The red one down the middle. My sister said you could put a bow on the front, to finish it.' You know the drawer she means. Beneath the bolt of satin sits a spool of oxblood silk, the colour your mother used to call Sunday best, and you wind a single yard of it onto a card while the rain drums on the canvas. She keeps her palms flat on the counter, the way people do when they have decided something and are waiting to be told it was right.

You cut the lace in a long curved edge, stitch the silk through the middle, and loop two tails with a little pull at the knot so the bow looks as though someone has just tugged it snug. It takes twenty minutes. A bus goes past and throws spray across the pavement. She turns the finished band over and over and says nothing for so long that you begin to think you've got the colour wrong.

Then she laughs, one short sound, and asks what you charge for a thing nobody will see. 'Everything,' you say, 'is for someone.' She pays in coins from a purse with a broken clasp and walks off into the wet, the red bow bright against the grey, a small defiant knot of colour moving down the market until the crowd takes it.