Left Behind, Jan Thor, 2006
This image more or less illustrates the story below. However, I include it here to illustrate one of my favorite points: the way we tell different stories about the same picture. Thor provides two (here), one “nice” and one “cruel”. For another image, he or she provides no less than ten stories(!)
Collars as icons of submission seem to be a relatively new script. Studio Biederer occasionally showed collars, as here, and they appear in BDSM prose at least as early as 1930, but they are fairly rare in the early 20th century, and not symbolically important.