Black lace-patterned bow tattoo with floral details on the side of a person's ribs, with the arm raised.

Lace-patterned bow tattoo on the ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black bow with a lace-like pattern, outlined in scalloped edges and filled with floral motifs and mesh-style shading across the loops and tails. The linework is clean and the shading is soft grey, giving the bow a delicate, fabric-like texture. It sits centred on the side of the ribcage against bare skin, with the raised arm framing the upper left of the photo.

Ribs Bow Lace Ribbon Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The officer at the post tips your aunt's sewing tin onto the steel counter, and the bobbins roll off and clack against the edge. You stand very still, the way she told you to, with your hands flat on the wet glass of the window. The bow lies in its nest of tissue paper, the one she spent three winters making, its loops scalloped like the edge of a doily and the mesh ground so fine that the lamp shows through it. He lifts it by one tail. The silk-thin ends sway and the flowers in the loops catch the light.

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"Lace," he says. "Declare it?"

"It's for a christening," you say. "A bonnet ribbon. Nothing that needs a stamp."

He does not look at you. He turns the bow over and holds it up to the lamp, and his thumb moves along one loop, tracing a little rosette the way a man might check a horse's leg. Something in his face softens, and he tells you, without being asked, that his mother made the same knot in the mesh in a town across the water, that she sold it for bread money and never wore a scrap of it herself. Then he folds the tissue back over the bow with more care than he used on your passport.

"Tell your aunt the tails are the best part," he says, and waves you through. You do not tell her until the next town, when you open the tin and find the bow exactly as she packed it, both tails hanging straight down like the ends of a ribbon pulled tight through a knot.