Colour tattoo of pink satin ribbons laced up the backs of both calves, finished with bows at the lower leg.

Pink ribbon lacing on both calves

Calf · Colour · Photo

A photograph of the back of a standing person's lower legs, with pink ribbons wrapped in a crisscross lace-up pattern from the calves toward the knees. Each leg has a pink bow with shaded loops and tails, drawn with dark outlines and soft tonal shading. The bright pink colour dominates against pale skin, and the wall and wooden floor in the background are plain.

Calf Ribbon Bow Corset Pink Leg Heel

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every autumn the fair came over Harrowby hill with its painted wagons and its ribbon-seller, a thin woman called Mother Tansy who sold pink silk by the yard and never measured twice. The village girls wanted her ribbons because they were the colour of the inside of a shell, and because she would tie a bow for nothing if you told her a true thing you had never said aloud.

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Nell Coker told her that her father owed the travelling men three pounds and would sell the mill horse before he sold the mill. Mother Tansy nodded, took a length from her wagon, and wound it up the carousel's centre pole in a crisscross like laces, from the boards to the height of a man's knee. At each turn she pulled it tight. Then she tied two bows, one on either side, and said, "A fair goes where its ribbons go. Tie a true knot and it stays until someone unties it properly."

The fair stayed through the frost and the snow that year. Nell went up the hill each night to pick at the knots, but the ribbon only pulled tighter, and the men in the field played cards by lantern light and seemed never to notice her. Her father found the money in a tin at the mill. Nobody could say how.

In spring the wagons rolled off without a sound. Nell walked up to the empty field and found the pole bare, the ribbon gone, and only the two bows lying in the wet grass. She picked one up. The loops had come undone all by themselves, and the tails pointed down the hill toward the village.