Fine line black tattoo of a ribbon bow wrapped around the wrist like a bracelet, with trailing ribbon ends, on the back of a hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bow bracelet tattoo on a wrist

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A single bow with two loops and two long trailing ribbon ends is drawn around the wrist, with the knot sitting on the back of the wrist and the tails falling towards the hand. The linework is thin and even, with little shading, and the design is in black ink only. The plain, blurred background keeps the focus on the wrist and hand.

Fine line Hand Bow Ribbon Bracelet Wrist

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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 rain has been coming sideways across the market since six, and you have been untangling the same spool of grey ribbon for an hour because your fingers want something to do. Mrs Okafor has already packed her tins of buttons and dragged her tarpaulin over the cabbages. Somewhere under the fishmonger's awning a dog is barking at nothing. You pull a length of satin through your knuckles, tie it into a bow to test the give, and it slips loose, the way it always does when your mind is on the wrong thing.

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A girl comes past with her hood up and stops at your trestle, water running off her fringe onto a card of hair slides. She doesn't want the slides. She wants a length of black ribbon, the good kind you keep for the Christmas parcels, and she holds out her wrist and asks if you can tie it so it won't come undone in the wet. You know the knot she means. Your mother tied one just like it on your school plimsolls, a bow with two loops that always looked like it might fly off if you breathed on it.

You make the loops, cross them, and leave the tails long so they trail. She turns her arm this way and that, watching the ends sway, and then she presses a coin into your palm, still warm from her pocket. She says she'll come back when the rain stops to buy the matching one for her sister. You nod, though you both know the rain doesn't stop in this town until April.

When the sky finally clears, the stall beside yours is empty and the awning has gone. You find the coin in the tin, and beneath it a folded square of paper with a single line in pencil: keep the tails long. So you do. Every time the weather turns, you tie a bow for whoever stops at your table, and you never once cut the ends short.