Two small traditional-style tattoos on fingers in a black and white photo, a red bow with a heart on one finger and a red bow on a torn paper design on another.

Red bow and heart tattoos on fingers

Traditional · Hand · Colour · Photo

Two small tattoos sit on adjacent fingers of a hand. The first shows a red bow with a heart at its centre, outlined in black with a few small dash marks beside it. The second shows a grey torn paper shape with a red bow and a small vertical line of text, set against a black and white photograph with only the red ink in colour.

Traditional Hand Bow Heart Ribbon Script

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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

The letter came down the Leeds cut on the Tuesday, lashed to the tiller of the Dorothy May with a length of red ribbon, and the paper had been torn clean across the middle before anyone thought to open it. Nell Hardcastle at the top lock swore she hadn't touched it. I believed her. She had the look of a woman who had already read everything the canal had to offer.

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Nobody on the towpath would say who had written it. I carried it inside my coat for three days, past Armley and the gasworks, past the boy who fished for perch with a bent pin and a jam jar. Each evening I untied the bow, read the one line that had survived the tear, and tied it up again tighter, the way my father taught me to lash a fender. The line said something about ringing the bell at the swing bridge. The rest had gone soft where the water had got into the fold.

At the swing bridge I rang the brass bell twice, as instructed, and nothing happened. A mile on, a woman in a man's overcoat stood on the bank holding a child's bucket of cold chips. She took the letter without a word, unknotted the ribbon and let the torn halves fall together on the water. They didn't sink. They drifted apart, one toward the reeds and one toward the sluice, and she watched them go as if she had expected nothing else.

"You could have posted it," I said. She shrugged. "It was never for the post." I tied the ribbon round my wrist for no good reason and kept steering, the red going pale and frayed in the wind off the water.