Woman in a studded black faux leather mini dress with lace panels, with a black and grey tattoo visible on her upper arm and another on her thigh.

Studded leather dress with tattooed arm and thigh

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A cropped photograph of a woman from the chest to mid-thigh, wearing a black faux leather mini dress with a studded corset-style bodice, lace-up front and lace panels down the side. Dark tattoos are visible on her upper arm and on her thigh, with the linework and shading partly obscured by the framing. The palette is mostly black and warm skin tones against a pale wall.

Upper arm Thigh Lace Woman

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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 pyramid studs came in a tin marked HALF-INCH, and Ruth had counted out four hundred of them by the time the kettle went cold on the bench. Aunt Ivy said brass was for belts and gold was for people who wanted to be seen from the car park, so the order had to be the warm bronze that caught the strip light and went dark again when you moved.

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The bodice took three weeks. Ivy cut the panels from a black faux leather that stretched like a wet glove, then laid lace over the flanks so the lining showed through in places, like a rumour that nobody repeated aloud. Ruth pricked the holes with the awl while Ivy drove the rivets home with a mallet, and neither of them said much, because the lacing was the hard part and it had to run true from the throat to the hip.

The client never came to fit it. A courier left an envelope of cash in the letterbox on a Thursday, and a note inside said only: keep the lace long. Ruth didn't understand until she set the bodice on the dummy and found, tucked behind the left panel, a row of extra eyelets that nobody had asked for.

She threaded the spare cord through them and finished it with a bow, the way Ivy had taught her to close a saddle girth. Then she turned the dummy to the window, where the bronze studs threw small hard lights across the wall, and saw that they made an arrow pointing south, towards the coast road and the fair that had packed up in Rhyl the week before.