Black and grey flash drawing of a cartoon-style young woman with curled hair, a red bow headband and blue and white flowers, designed as a tattoo.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Curly-haired portrait with red bow and flowers

Mixed · Flash

A pencil-style drawing of a cartoon-style young woman with curled dark hair, shown from the shoulders up on a plain white background. Her hair is decorated with a red bow headband and clusters of white and blue flowers with red berries. The face and hair are rendered in soft black and grey shading, while the bow and flowers carry the only colour.

Woman Portrait Flower Bow Headband Curly hair Berry

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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 was the first thing I saw of her, a red slash above the reeds as the Marigold came round the bend at Stoke Lock. Grandad always said you could read a towpath the way you read a tide table, and this one said a stranger was waiting, with forget-me-nots and rowan berries pinned in her hair as though she had dressed for a wedding and then lost the church.

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She asked for passage to Hebden in a voice like she was ordering a pie. Grandad took her fare in coppers and told her the cabin stank of paraffin. She sat on the coal box anyway, one hand flat on a hatbox in her lap, and did not look at the water once. Forty miles of locks is a long way to go without looking at water.

Somewhere past Cromford she pulled the ribbon loose and asked whether I knew what it had been for. I said it was for the hair. She said it had been for a dance in a village that was flooded for a reservoir before she was born, and that the boy who gave it to her had gone off to sea with a tie-up rope still in his pocket. I believed her about the rope. Nobody invents a detail like that.

At the last lock she tied the ribbon to the tiller, neat as a bow on a parcel, and stepped off onto the stones without a word. Grandad steered us out into the cut. All the way to the next bridge that red scrap fluttered at the end of the tiller, the only colour on the whole grey stretch of water, and I did not have the heart to untie it.