Two views of a calf with a colourful abstract tattoo of red, yellow, mint and black ribbon-like bands and shapes wrapping around the leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Abstract ribbon design on a calf

Calf · Colour · Photo

The tattoo covers the calf in two side-by-side views and shows swooping ribbon-like bands in red, yellow, orange and mint green, with black circular and curved shapes and brown blocks. The shapes overlap and run diagonally around the leg, with a small outlined circular motif visible near the ankle in the side view. The colours are flat and saturated against the pale skin, and the photos are evenly lit against a plain background.

Calf Abstract shape Ribbon Circle Geometric shape

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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 dye vats at the Lantern Street works never came fully clean, so every ribbon that left the place carried a little of the week before. Mrs Ilse Varga ran the finishing room with a pair of shears on a cord round her neck. She would hold a length of silk up to the skylight and say, that one is shouting, that one needs to be softer. Nobody argued. She had dressed the company's costumes for thirty years.

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The spring number was meant to be about the harbour fair, and the designer, a thin man who painted his fingernails black, sent down a sketch of bands crossing on the diagonal. Red for the fire on the quay. Yellow for the sun over the cranes. Mint for a sea he had never seen but insisted was that colour. Ilse dyed forty yards of each and pinned them to the loft beams, where they swung like washing over the stage below.

On the night of the dress rehearsal the lamp in the wheel room failed. The dancers went on in half dark, and the only light was one working spot that caught the black discs hanging on their strings and turned them slowly, like the wheels of a cart on a wet road. Ilse stood in the wings and watched the ribbons come down through the dust. The brown blocks she had dyed from an old sack of tea stains looked, under that thin beam, like the shadows of buildings.

Afterwards the designer wanted the mint band cut down for the finale. Ilse said nothing. She unpinned the last length herself, folded it into a square, and put it in her apron pocket, where it stayed for the rest of the season.