Colour tattoo of a pink and red polka dot bow with a red heart and teal ribbon on a forearm, with a second blurred bow tattoo above it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Polka dot bow with heart on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A large bow with pink and red polka dots and a red heart at its centre, outlined in dark blue, sits on the forearm. Teal ribbon tails loop across the design, and a smaller, softer-focus bow in pink and teal sits above it on the same arm. The photograph is taken outdoors against blurred green grass, with frayed denim shorts at the right edge of the frame.

Forearm Bow Heart Polka dot Ribbon

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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

Right, sit down, the lot of you, and mind the pram. You want the one about the ribbon shop under the flats on Carrow Road? Course you do. Everybody wants the one with the bow in it.

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The shop was called Pell and Daughter, though there was never a daughter, only Mrs Pell's nephew Dennis, who sucked boiled sweets like they owed him money. Every Saturday the whole estate climbed the stairs of Harcourt House with their pocket money in their fists. Pink with white spots, teal like the sea off Clacton, and the red one with the heart at its middle that nobody could afford but everybody coveted. Mrs Pell would tie a bow on the counter quick as a magpie and say, "Now that's a bow that knows where it's going."

Then the winter the lift broke for three months, and nobody would climb eleven floors for a yard of ribbon. Dennis went down the docks for work. Mrs Pell sat at her kitchen table on the ninth floor with a tin of buttons and a stack of unsold spools, and she pinned the lot along the balcony rail so the wind could have a go at them. By March the kids had started tying scraps to every railing on the way home, and the whole block looked like a parade had got stuck halfway.

Come the thaw, Mrs Pell came down to the shop and found a note under the door in crayon: Can we have the bow with the heart, please. We have paid in conkers. She laughed till she had to sit on the step. She gave them the bow, and she gave them the spools too. Mind, I still have the button, and I'll show you it if you're good.