Colour tattoo of an orange awareness ribbon looped through a black outlined heart filled with swirls, on the calf.

Orange awareness ribbon in a swirl heart on calf

Calf · Colour · Photo

A solid orange awareness ribbon loops across a heart outline drawn in black linework, with curling scroll shapes filling the heart. The ribbon has soft tonal shading while the swirls are plain black lines against the skin. The tattoo sits centrally on a calf, with a grey garment above and a grey floor and white trainer with pink trim below.

Calf Awareness ribbon Heart Swirl Scrollwork

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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 railings on Ashdown House were the council's idea of ornament, cast-iron scrolls bolted to every balcony so the place might pass for grand. Nobody had painted them since the nineties. I had a tin of black gloss and a stiff brush, and most mornings I was on the fourteenth floor with the radio going, working my way round the curls one at a time.

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Mrs Adeyemi on eleven asked me to leave one balcony alone. Her daughter lived in Leeds and sent her photos of hospital car parks, and every spring she pinned an orange ribbon to her coat, bright as a traffic cone. "Just the swirl by the bin store," she said. "Let it rust a bit. Let it look like something."

I didn't argue. I kept the brush off that one curl, and every time I came down the stairs I saw the rust creeping through it like a loose thread. In March the lift packed in again, and I spent two hours stuck in it with a pot of primer and a boy from flat nine who kept asking whether lifts ever fell.

The week after the service, Mrs Adeyemi's daughter came up from Leeds with a roll of orange ribbon. She stood on the balcony by the bin store and tied it round the rail, loop over loop, until it sat right where the iron curled in on itself. Nobody asked me to paint over it. I still haven't.