Close-up photo of a shaded purple ribbon loop with a red stripe, crossed by a silver spoon and ornate cross, tattooed on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Purple ribbon and silver spoon tattoo

Realism · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a looped purple ribbon with a red stripe and a shaded highlight along its edges, with a silver spoon and a decorative silver cross-shaped ornament where they cross. The spoon and ornament are rendered in grey with soft shadows and metallic highlights, giving a dimensional effect. The tattoo fills the centre of the frame against a plain, slightly warm skin background.

Realism Ribbon Cross Awareness ribbon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Agnes Pell hammered spoons out of her late husband's silver every winter, and every winter she made one more than she sold. That one was for the forest. The old folk said it must be laid at the crossroads before the first thaw, bowl up, with a length of ribbon knotted round its neck so the wood would know whose it was.

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The Lindqvist boy had gone into the trees after a lost goat in the autumn and not come out. His mother came to Agnes's door with a purple ribbon she had woven herself, a red thread running down the middle, and asked whether the spoon could hold a cross as well, since the parson had said a cross would keep a wanderer walking the right way. Agnes said nothing. She soldered a silver cross onto the handle, filed the joint smooth, and let the two lie together on the anvil overnight until they would not come apart.

On the first morning of thaw she walked to the crossroads with the spoon wrapped in a cloth. The hawthorn was bare except for the old ribbon, faded to the colour of a bruised plum. She tied the new spoon beneath it, bowl turned toward the trees, and waited. A blackbird landed on the bowl, looked at her with one bright eye, and flew off down the left-hand path, the one that bent toward the village.

Three days later the boy walked out of the wood with mud to his knees and the goat bleating at his heels, asking what there was for supper. Nobody told him why his mother wept so hard at the gate. Agnes kept a spoon in her apron pocket for the rest of her life, and when the ribbon rotted off the hawthorn she tied on another.