Sketchy orange and black tattoo of a bow with a ribbon trailing down the spine, with cursive script written on the ribbon, on the upper back and neck.

Bow and script ribbon on upper back

Back · Mixed · Photo

A tattoo of a loose-drawn bow sits at the base of the neck, with a long ribbon running down the centre of the upper back. The ribbon carries lines of cursive script, and the linework is dark and sketchy with soft orange and yellow washes. The composition is centred on the back, with the bow at the top and the ribbon tapering towards the lower back.

Back Neck Bow Ribbon Script Spine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had tied the bundle three times before the bow sat right. The silk had faded to the colour of weak tea from being kept in the dresser drawer, and the knot kept slipping on the cold oilcloth, where the lamp could not quite reach. Her father's letters lay beside it in a shoebox that had once held boots from Carlisle. She had promised herself she would read only the first line of each. Instead she read the whole of the March one and then sat with both hands flat on the table while the kettle went cold.

Keep reading

Outside, the yard light buzzed and laid a yellow square across the frozen trough. Moss, the collie, had come in from the byre and lay with his nose against the stove door, sniffing at the singed wool smell from the morning's mending. Nell read the line again aloud, badly, the way her grandmother had taught her to sound out the looped letters. Moss thumped his tail once, which was as much as anyone had got from him on a Thursday.

In the morning the lane was white and the ground too hard for a spade. She carried the bundle down to the gate, where the old post leaned into the hedge, and wound the ribbon twice around it, loosely, so the wind could get at it. The letters she kept folded in her coat. By noon the bow had worked itself undone, and the long orange tail of the ribbon lay out across the snow, the lines of writing dark against the white, readable from the road for as long as the light held.