Black and grey fine line tattoo of a bow with trailing ribbons on the calf, with a ribbon band wrapped around the ankle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bow and ribbon tattoo on a calf

Fine line · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A lower leg shows a tattoo of a bow with two long trailing ribbon tails, drawn in outline with soft grey shading. A band of ribbon with a stitched or dotted edge wraps around the ankle below it. The background is a dark, out-of-focus fabric, which keeps the pale skin and grey ink as the main focus.

Fine line Calf Ankle Bow Ribbon Band Leg

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Cardew counted the sheets twice before she let Nessa take the bundle up the back stairs, because the guests at Marine Terrace paid for linen that smelled of the sea and not of the boiler. Nessa was fourteen and had never been allowed to stop on the landing, but she stopped anyway, because the window at the turn of the stairs looked straight down onto the pier and the gulls were quarrelling over a dropped pasty.

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Rooms six and seven shared a wall and, for most of the summer, a ribbon. Nobody in the house could say which lodger had left it, only that it had hung from the brass bedpost in number seven since the August before, a soft grey length with a neat dotted thread stitched along both edges. Nessa took it down each Monday to iron it. Each Monday she tied it into the same bow, letting the two long tails fall the way the wind off the water made everything fall in that town, sideways and slightly reluctant.

In September a schoolmaster came to number seven with a suitcase tied shut with cord. He was courteous and damp from the crossing, and he noticed the ribbon before he noticed her. Did it belong to the house, he asked. Nessa said it belonged to whoever came back for it. He laughed at that, not unkindly, and said that in his experience nothing was ever collected from a boarding house, it simply went on being useful to somebody else.

She left it where it was. When she closed the door, the window was open a crack and the ribbon lifted from the bedpost, both tails rising as if they had heard their name called from the harbour, then settled back against the brass.