Black and grey shaded bow tattoo with an outlined loop and tails on the nape of a person's neck, with hair pinned up above it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bow tattoo on the nape of the neck

Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A small bow is tattooed on the back of a person's neck, shown from behind with their hair pinned up. The bow has a bold black outline, with soft grey shading on the loops and tails to suggest volume. The image is warm toned and softly focused, with a white lace strap visible at the lower right.

Neck Bow Ribbon

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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

Sit nearer the fire, the lot of you, because the snow has shut the pass and nobody leaves Hollin's Cross until the ploughs come through. That gives me until breakfast to earn my supper. You want the story of the ribbon-maker's bow? Then hush, and listen for the knot, because the knot is the whole of it.

Keep reading

Old Maud Pellow sold ribbon from a barrow outside the Cross, black silk mostly, for mourning and for weddings, and she tied every length into a bow before it left her hands. Her fingers were quick and never once pulled too tight. Her customers said a Maud bow would hold a letter shut through a river crossing. A carter's boy, Tobias Greave, came every market day with a penny in his fist and bought a single yard of silk he never once used.

He kept it folded in his coat through a winter of frost and debt. When the thaw turned the road to mud, he rode out to Lanthorn farm, where a girl was to be married in June. He tied the silk round a sprig of rosemary, meaning to hand it over at the gate, but the wind took the bow clean off the stalk and carried it over the wall into the orchard. He did not go after it. He never told anyone why.

Years on, a tinker mending pots in Hollin's Cross found a bow of black silk pinned inside the lid of his grandmother's box, tied so neatly that he swore no hand but Maud's could have made it. Nobody in the valley ever learned how it had travelled so far. So mind the stove and go up to bed, the lot of you. The ploughs will come when they come, and a good knot, like a good story, holds until somebody needs it undone.