Small shaded pink ribbon tattoo on the inner wrist of a hand held palm facing the camera, with a soft grey shadow along one edge.

Pink ribbon tattoo on the wrist

Other · Colour · Photo

A small pink ribbon tattoo sits on the inner wrist, shown from the palm side of a hand with two silver rings on the fingers. The ribbon has a looped, three-dimensional form with soft pink shading and a darker grey edge. The plain dark clothing and blurred background keep the focus on the tattoo.

Other Ribbon Hand Wrist

Find an artist for this

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 you down by the stove, because the wind has come round and this one takes a while. Eighteen sixty-two, the barque Constance Ardle out of Bristol with coal for Valparaiso, and nothing aboard her but salt pork and sailors who'd sworn off the drink for a fortnight and broke the vow on the first night. There was a boy called Samuel Pardew who could splice rope faster than any man in the watch, and in his shirt pocket he carried a length of pink silk he'd bought from a dyer's widow in the Bristol market for a penny-halfpenny. Pink as a shell, he told everyone. For his mother, he said, though he never once explained why it had to be a ribbon and not a letter.

Keep reading

Off the Horn the weather took them. Three days hove-to, the sea coming over the rail like it had a grudge against the whole ship, and on the third morning Samuel went aloft to clear a fouled topsail. He came down with his hands raw and his face white, and when the mate asked him what was wrong he pulled the silk from his pocket and held it out, and a squall snatched it straight off his palm. It went over the side, a small pink flag bobbing away in the grey, and the boy stood at the rail until the mate hauled him back by the collar.

They made Valparaiso in the spring. Samuel bought a fresh length from a stall near the harbour, knotted it round his own wrist so he'd not lose it again, and wrote his mother a letter she'd have to read twice to understand. Three years on, when the Ardle finally tied up in Bristol, a woman was waiting at the quay with her sleeve pushed back. Round her wrist was the same pink silk, faded at the edges, tied in the same looped knot. She held out her arm and didn't say a word, and Samuel understood that the letter had been read after all.