Small purple and violet tattoo of a ribbon with a rose-like swirl, outlined in black, on the inner wrist and forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Purple ribbon and rose on wrist

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A small tattoo of a purple ribbon-like shape with a rose-like swirl at its centre, set on pale skin at the wrist. Black linework outlines the design, and the purple fill has soft violet shading. The tattoo sits near the centre of the frame against a dark background.

Forearm Ribbon Rose

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Win, the sea has found its way under the back bedroom door again, so Mrs Harcourt has moved down to the room over the kitchen where the pipes knock like someone wanting to be let in. She says she doesn't mind. She has been humming the same hymn since breakfast, which is how I know she minds a great deal.

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I found the ribbon while stripping her bed. It was folded round a dried rose inside a hatbox, tucked between a pair of wrist-length gloves and a train ticket to Ramsgate dated April 1947. The ribbon had gone the colour of plums left too long on the sill, and the rose had faded to the shade of weak tea. I put them back exactly as I found them. When I mentioned it at tea she only asked whether the tide was coming in or going out.

Last night I bought a crab from the harbour for her supper, because I thought company might do more good than soup. We ate on the back step with the lamp unlit. She told me the rose was from her brother, who drew pictures on the backs of fish crates and never once came home from Dunkirk. The ribbon, she said, was for their mother, who had kept the wireless tuned to the shipping forecast every night for twenty years, as if the sea might owe her an answer.

I've pinned the ribbon to the corkboard by the front door, between the bus timetable and a card from the Lindsays. Come at Easter. Bring the good scissors, the rose wants trimming, and I'd like you to sit with her while I see to the breakfasts. She asks after you every day, and I have never once managed to tell her you're in Leeds with your feet up.