Colour tattoo of a blue bow with a small red drop beneath it, outlined in black and shaded in a traditional style, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue bow with red drop on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A blue bow with two long trailing loops sits at the centre of the image, with a small red drop hanging below the loops. The bow has black outlines and soft blue shading that gives the ribbon a rounded, folded look. It is photographed straight on against plain skin and grey flooring, with the design filling the middle of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, all of you, and mind the candle, because this is the part about the ribbon. My grandmother's aunt Ivy sewed for the Harrow girls the spring the church roof came down. The blue silk came from a travelling man who swore it had been dyed with bluebells off Greave hill. He sold her one yard of it, and she kept that yard back for something blue.

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The bride that year was Maud Tolley, who had no money and a temper, and who had promised her mother she would marry in her own dress and not the Calloway hand-me-down. Ivy stitched the sleeves by lamplight. Toward three in the morning she pricked her thumb on the needle, and a single drop fell onto the ribbon, bright as a cherry, and sank into the weave. She swore, then laughed, then rubbed at it with spit and salt, and the mark would not come out. It sat there like a seal on a letter.

So Maud walked up the aisle with that bow tied at her wrist. When the vicar asked who gave this woman away, she said nobody, she was giving herself, and the bow slipped loose and fell by the font. Ivy picked it up and kept it in her apron pocket for forty years. Nobody in the village remembers a word of the vows. What they remember is the blue, and that little red mark, which Ivy always said was the only honest thing in the whole affair.

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