Colour tattoo of a looped ribbon in rainbow stripes with a black outline, placed on the inside of a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rainbow ribbon on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A looped ribbon shape sits on the inner forearm, with its loops and tails filled in with bands of red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple. A bold black outline defines the shape, and the colour is smoothly shaded within each band to give a soft gradient. The plain skin and dark background keep the focus on the tattoo, which is photographed straight on.

Forearm Ribbon Rainbow

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

The last ribbon we owned was the one Mrs Okonedo stitched from the old stage curtains after the council stopped paying for the big top's canvas. Six bands of silk, dyed in a copper pan over a camping stove behind the horse box: red bleeding into orange, yellow, green, blue, and a purple that never quite took. Nobody else in the company could hold a ribbon wand the way she could, so when Dennis told us we would close at the end of the month, she was the one who said we would dance the figure of eight one more time.

Keep reading

We played Shrewsbury on a wet Thursday to fourteen people and a dog. The spotlight was a single lamp on a rope, and the damp made the silk heavy, so it hung in long loops instead of flying. She traced the eight in the air with her wrist turning slow, the colours running from one loop into the next, and the lamp caught each band as it passed. Dennis stood in the wings with his cracked top hat in both hands and didn't say a word, which was the nicest thing he'd done all year.

Afterwards a girl of about seven in a borrowed coat waited by the ticket table until we came out. She asked why the ribbon was shaped like that, and Mrs Okonedo said you could draw it without lifting your pen. The girl took the wand from her, tried a loop, and the silk dropped in a wet heap across her shoes. "Again," the girl said, and Mrs Okonedo laughed for the first time that week and helped her lift it.