Realism style tattoo of a pink ribbon loop with a shaded grey cross on a rosary-style cord, on the side of the ribs.

Pink ribbon and cross on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A pink ribbon loop curves across the skin, with a grey cross hanging from a beaded cord that runs down from its centre. The ribbon has soft pink shading and a subtle shadow, while the cross and cord are rendered in grey with highlights that give them a three-dimensional look. The tattoo sits on the side of the torso against a plain skin background, with a white shirt and a hand with purple nails at the edges of the frame.

Realism Ribs Ribbon Cross Rosary Bead

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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

Sit down, the lot of you, before the soup goes cold and Brenda starts counting chairs. I have been asked for a story, and I shall give you one, though it is about a ribbon and a length of string, which is the sort of story my mother would have told if she had ever sat still long enough.

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Up a steep street in Hebden Bridge there lived a seamstress called Agnes Holt, who sewed christening sashes for the chapel and mended the vicar's cassocks for nothing. One spring a widow left her a box of jet beads she had no use for, and Agnes strung them on blue cord, knot by knot, until there were enough for a rosary. The cross she bought off a pedlar for a shilling. Then she took a length of pink silk left over from the last sash and tied it in a loop above the cross, so the whole thing hung like a bell rope. Her boy, Thomas, asked why it needed a ribbon. She said a loop is the shape of a road that comes back to you.

Thomas went to sea at seventeen. The letters came slow, with stamps from places he called hot and places he called worse. Agnes kept the beads in her apron pocket and worked them between her fingers while she sewed. The silk faded to the colour of a boiled sweet, then to the colour of weak tea, and she never once replaced it, because she said the faded part was the bit that had been out in the weather with him.

Thomas came home with a bad hand and a worse cough, and found her at the kitchen table with the cord unpicked and re-knotted nine times over. He said, Mam, it is only a bit of string. She said, so is a marriage, and look at this lot. So the cross goes to whoever is wed next in this family, and I'll ask you all to raise your glass to the knot, not the ribbon, because the knot is the bit someone had to tie with their own two hands.