Colour tattoo of a pink bow with shaded ribbon loops and black flourish linework on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Pink bow with black swirls on upper back

Fine line · Back · Mixed · Photo

A shaded pink bow sits on the upper back with two long black tails curling downwards and a black scroll flourish rising above it. Small pink buds appear at the top of the swirling black linework. The bow uses soft pink and magenta shading against the fine black lines, and the design is centred on the skin with plenty of space around it.

Fine line Back Bow Ribbon Swirl Flourish Bud Pink

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on the fourteenth floor admitted to tying the first ribbon to the lift gate, but by the second week of March there were eleven of them, all pink, all knotted in the same loose way, lifting and settling against the scuffed steel every time the doors shuddered open. I had the keys to the plant room and a mop I didn't need, so I was the one who noticed they never came down. Somebody was going round at night and tying them back up.

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It took me until Thursday to catch her. Her name was Maisie Dunmore, nine years old, in a dressing gown with a rocket on it, standing on the bottom rung of a stepladder she had no business climbing. She had a reel of ribbon tucked under one arm and her tongue between her teeth. When she saw me she didn't stop. "They keep falling off," she said, quite reasonable, as though I'd asked. "Mum says things need a bow when they're going somewhere."

I didn't know what to say to that, so I held the ladder steady and handed her the scissors. She made the loops the way you'd draw a swirl in the margin of a school exercise book, one lazy curl after another, tails hanging down past the knot. It was the sort of thing my own mother used to do with the bread bag ties, a small defiance against the grey corridor.

On Friday the council sent a letter about the lift. I took the ribbons down myself before the engineer came, folding each one into my pocket. Then, once the lift was humming again, I tied one back on, low on the steel, where a child could reach it. The doors opened on a wash of pink, and Maisie, in her rocket gown, gave a little wave to nobody at all.