Fine line red bow tattoo on the side of a finger, with the hand held in a loose fist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red bow tattoo on a finger

Fine line · Hand · Colour · Photo

A small bow with two loops and trailing ends is drawn in thin red linework on the side of a finger. The hand is curled into a loose fist, so the tattoo sits at a slight angle and is partly shaded by the neighbouring finger. The ink is a single bright red against pale skin, and the blurred background is plain and indoors.

Fine line Hand Bow 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

Old Hester kept the ribbon cart at the back of the Michaelmas fair, past the gingerbread stall and the swing boats, and she sold nothing but red. Red for luck, she said. Red for the ones who went off down the road and didn't write.

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Dilys came to her in October with a shilling she had earned mucking out the pony lines and asked for a bow she could carry. Hester cut a length of thread from the spool, no thicker than an eyelash, and tied it twice round the side of the girl's smallest finger. "Pull it tight and don't look at it," she said. "A bow holds what you mean to let go of. It won't hold what you keep."

Dilys walked the fair road for a week after that. At every stall she asked after a lad with a fiddle and a green cap. The showmen laughed at her. The toffee man gave her a stick for nothing. On the seventh night the fair packed up and rolled east, and she followed the lanterns until she found the boy sitting on a cart shaft at a crossroads in the rain, mending a fiddle string with a length of red thread.

She did not say a word. She slid the bow off her finger, looped the thread over his wrist, and walked home without it. When Hester asked her later whether the boy had been worth the walk, Dilys only held up her hand and showed her the bare finger, pale where the thread had been. The bow had only ever been for the one who tied it.