Pink brushstroke awareness ribbon tattoo on the side of the ribcage against a plain blue background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pink awareness ribbon on the side of the torso

Ribs · Colour · Photo

A pink awareness ribbon is tattooed on pale skin in a loose, painterly brushstroke style with soft edges and a tapering tail. The ribbon is rendered in a single bright pink tone, with slightly deeper shading where the loops cross. The close-up photograph is taken against a plain blue background, with a dark strap visible at the lower right edge.

Ribs Ribbon Awareness ribbon Brushstroke

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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

Now sit down, the lot of you, and mind the sawdust, because I am going to tell you about the brush that painted the banner over the stage at the Pavilion. Nineteen fifty-one it was, the summer the band from Hull came down with their drums in the back of a hearse. A sign-writer called Nell Garside came along with them, carrying a tin of pink enamel and a brush worn down to a wedge. Nobody asked her to paint anything. She simply looked at the bare wall above the piano and said it wanted a ribbon.

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The lads laughed. Ribbons, they said, were for maypoles and funerals. But Nell stood on a stepladder with her hip against the rail and drew the thing in one breath, no pencil, no chalk line. The loop came round first, fat and certain, then the tail dragged down and thinned out to nothing the way a stream thins over a weir. She never went back over a single stroke. When she climbed down, the colour had deepened where the two arms crossed, and the room had gone quiet, the way rooms do when somebody has done something without asking leave.

The dancing went on until two. Nobody could say afterwards who had partnered whom, but everybody remembered the wall. Nell packed her tin the next morning and took the train to Scarborough, and the ribbon survived three coats of distemper and a fire that took the stage curtains. The Pavilion came down in the sixties, but I have seen that same stroke on a brick in the new car park, faded to the colour of a rose petal left out in the rain.

So when the band strikes up tonight, look at the tail of that ribbon in your mind. It does not end. It simply runs out of breath. Now, who wants the next waltz?