A solid red bow tattoo with a black outline and a darker red centre sits on the upper buttock of a person wearing patterned underwear.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red bow tattoo on a hip

Other · Colour · Photo

The photograph shows a red bow tattoo on the upper buttock, seen from behind, with the subject wearing black clothing above and a printed cartoon-character underwear waistband below. The bow has a bold black outline, flat red fill and a darker red knot at its centre, with no shading. The plain, close framing centres the tattoo against bare skin, with a cluttered bedroom visible in the background.

Other 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

Mind the step, it's loose, same as my knee. You want the ribbon shop? Shut since the spring, but the sign's still up over the door, red as the day Auntie Pen painted it. Every fishing wife on Gull Row knew that red. She bought her silk off a man who came in on the Thursday boat, and she kept it in a tin under the counter, rolled tight as sausage.

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The summer the herring went north, the Harrow brothers came in with a daft idea. They wanted to tie something bright to the mooring buoys so the coastguard could tell whose boat was whose after the fog. Pen said she'd do it for nothing if they carried her coal up the hill. So she cut lengths of red silk, sewed each one into a bow with a knot in the middle hard as a fist, and tied them on the buoy chains. Bold, she said. You can see a bold thing in the dark when your eyes are wet.

The fog came in October and didn't lift for nine days. Two boats went out and only one came back, and the lad on it swore he steered home by those red bows flapping at the harbour mouth like little flags. Pen never took a penny for another bow after that. She said the silk had done its job and the rest of us could pay her in fish.

So when you walk out past the shop tonight, look at the rail. Some of those bows are still there, faded to rust, and every knot is pulled tight enough to hold. That's all a bow is, love. A knot that wants to be found.