Realistic black and grey tattoo of a tattoo machine and a lace garter with a bow, sitting on the thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tattoo machine and lace garter on a thigh

Realism · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A tattoo of a tattoo machine rests over a lace garter with a pale ribbon bow on the upper thigh. The shading is smooth and realistic, with soft grey tones on the machine and the lace pattern, and a light peach tint on the ribbon. The garter fills the lower half of the frame, with a real lace fabric visible at the top left.

Realism Thigh Tattoo machine Garter Lace Ribbon Bow

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Irene had carried the garter in her handbag for three weeks before she showed it to anyone, the lace gone soft as a dishcloth from being folded so often. Her mother had worn it at her wedding in 1951 and afterwards kept it on a hook in the hall, where it hung like a pale moth until the day Irene took it down. When she finally laid it on the counter of Pargeter's Tattoo Rooms on Sea Road, Ray looked at it for a long time without speaking. Then he went into the back and came out with his old machine, the black one with the chipped grip, and set it down on top of the lace as though he were laying a cup on a saucer.

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"That's the one I learned on," he said. "Dad's before that." Irene asked him to draw the two of them together so that nobody, ever, would be able to say which one mattered more. He did it in pencil on greaseproof paper, pressing so hard the lace pattern came through to the back. Her mother's hands had been the first thing Irene ever saw moving a needle through cloth so fast it blurred, and she said so, and Ray nodded as if that were the most ordinary thing in the world to say in a tattoo shop.

The work took two sessions. Ray talked the whole time about the Humber, about the bread van that had lost its brakes outside the Co-op, and about a pigeon that had flown into the shop and stayed for an afternoon. He never once asked her why. When the ribbon bow was finished he wiped it down and held up a mirror, and she looked at the peach tint on the ribbon, bright as the inside of a shell, and felt something loosen that she had not known was tied.

Outside, the wind came off the estuary and pushed a crisp packet along the pavement. Behind her she heard the old machine start up again, buzzing like a bee caught in a jar, while Ray went on with someone else's Tuesday.