Black and grey tattoo of two feathers hanging from a looped ribbon with a bead detail, wrapped around an ankle.

Feather and ribbon ankle tattoo

Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A bare foot and ankle show a black and grey tattoo of a ribbon that loops around the ankle, tied in a bow with a small bead at the centre. Two feathers hang down from the knot, with soft shading along their barbs and fine lines defining the quills. The background is a sepia-toned image of a building or structure, and the toenails are painted black.

Ankle Feather Ribbon Bow Bead Foot

Find an artist for this

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

Dear Marguerite,

Keep reading

I found the box under the stairs at Mum's, the one with your handwriting on the lid, and inside it was the green ribbon you tied round my ankle the summer the Tyne flooded the allotments. Two grey feathers were pinned to it with a glass bead, the sort you bought from the market stall by the bus station for twelve pence. I had forgotten you kept the feathers. I had not forgotten the bead.

You will want to know whether I got the tattoo. I did, in March, at a little place above the chippy on Ridley Road, where the artist let me sit with my foot on a towel while the radio played Radio Two. He asked what the ribbon meant. I said it meant that someone had once been braver than me and had tied it on anyway, and he nodded as if that were a perfectly good design brief. He shaded the barbs so they looked soft enough to lift off the page.

The reunion is on the fourteenth at the Working Men's Club, and I have decided I am going, though I am not sure I can stand in the car park and admit it. If you come, bring the bead. I will bring the feathers, which I have kept in a tin for thirty years and which now have nowhere to be but on my foot.

With love, and the bow tied properly this time, Jean