Black and grey script tattoo across a torso above a black thong, with a portrait of a woman and a lace garter tattoo on the thighs.

Script across the abdomen and portrait on the thigh

Lettering · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A torso and upper thighs are shown, with a large black and grey script tattoo across the lower abdomen and a small anchor near the hip. On one thigh is a shaded portrait of a woman's face framed by ornate detailing, and on the other thigh a lace-pattern garter tattoo in dark ink. The image is cropped at the chest and face, with soft shading and a light bedding background.

Lettering Blackwork Thigh Other Script Anchor

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Your mother said the net-loft smelled of tar and sleep, and she was right, but by August of 1953 you had stopped minding. You worked the nets for Halloran's boats at Carrick Hythe because the wages were better than the laundry, and because on Thursdays the lamps went on at the Gull and Anchor and Ruth Pennock sang with the wireless turned down to a whisper behind the bar.

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Ruth had a black lace stocking she wore to sing in, patterned like frost on a window, and she let you look at it the once, the night she told you she was leaving for Liverpool on the Tuesday boat. She said the sea had never once asked her to stay. You said it had asked you every morning for eleven years, in the particular cold of the harbour wall, and she laughed so hard she had to put her glass down.

On the last Tuesday you walked her down the slipway with a carrier bag of her things. The tide was out and the mud shone like pewter. Halloran's boy was already casting off the Margaret Jane, and a gull sat on the bollard watching the two of you the way gulls watch anything that might drop a crust.

She stopped at the bottom of the steps and pulled up her sleeve so you could see the anchor she had had inked over the winter by a man from Hull who worked out of the back of a barber's. Then she said, Keep the lamp lit for me, and went up the gangway without looking back. You stood there until the boat was a smudge, and then you went home and lit the lamp.