Back of a person's neck and upper back showing a sketch-style orange and black bow tattoo with a ribbon trailing down the spine, carrying handwritten script.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bow and ribbon with script on upper back

Back · Mixed · Photo

A bow tattoo sits at the base of the neck and at the top of the upper back, with its ribbon tails falling down the spine. The bow is drawn with black linework and filled with loose orange and yellow wash, giving a sketchy, painterly finish. Handwritten script runs down the ribbon, and the pale skin and soft, even lighting keep the composition simple.

Back Neck Bow Ribbon Spine

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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 ribbon came off the bundle the morning the lock keeper at Hythe waved you through without asking for your papers. You untied it with your teeth, the way your mother used to, and the silk had gone the colour of marmalade where the damp had crept into the knot. Your brother's letters had lived in a biscuit tin under the bunk for three winters, and you had never once been brave enough to open the lid past the first envelope.

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Marigold Ann settled into her wake like a dog turning round on a rug. The stove ticked. Outside, the willows along the cut dragged their fingers in the water, and the light came through the cabin window in orange slants that looked, if you squinted, like the wash the signwriter in Ghent had painted over his sketches. You spread the letters across the table in the order they had arrived, not the order they had been written, because you had decided that was how he would want them read: as a river, not a ledger.

The last one was short. Tom had written it in pencil on the back of a shipping chit, the handwriting sloping downhill as if it were trying to reach the edge of the paper. He said the bow he had tied for you at the market was still in the bottom of his kitbag, and that he would not be needing it until he came home to claim the ribbon back. You laughed until the kettle boiled over. Then you rewound the silk around your wrist, tied a bow far too neat for the hands that had made it, and let the loose tail trail off the stern into the brown current, watching it go down toward the sea.