Two hands with intertwined fingers showing matching small red fine line bow tattoos on the fingers.

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Matching red bow tattoos on fingers

Fine line · Hand · Colour · Photo

Two hands are held together with the fingers interlocked, and each shows a small red bow tattoo on one finger. The bows have thin, delicate outlines with minimal shading, and the red ink stands out against the skin. The soft, close framing centres both bows, with pale pink nail polish visible on one hand.

Fine line Hand Bow Ribbon Matching

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The third time the bow came out crooked, Ada tore it off with her teeth and dropped the thread in the coal scuttle. "Hold still, Mags. You're not a parcel."

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"I am holding still. You're the one shaking."

Their father had come home from the Hull trawlers with a tin of red silk that a deckhand had given him for his sea chest, and the girls had claimed it the way children claim anything that might be worth a fight. Ada was twelve and Mags was nine, and in a fishing town on the Humber there were not many things a girl could own that would last a winter. So they made a rule. Each tied a bow on the other's finger before the boats went out, and the one left behind kept the ends in a jar on the windowsill. When the boats came in, the bow came off, and whoever had the ribbon ends pulled, and the other came home.

The first year it worked. The second year Mags caught the fever in February and Ada sat by the bed with the jar in her lap, counting the bows she had left in it, which was only one. Mags got up again. Nobody could say why, except that Ada had tied the knot tighter than the doctor thought necessary and would not untie it until the fever broke.

The last time Ada tied one, she did it on her own hand, pulling the thread through with her teeth. When the tide came in with the trawlers, Mags was already on the quay with her fingers laced into her sister's, the red bows pressed together between them, and neither of them let go to take the ends from the jar.