A small red bow tattoo with a thick black outline sits on a person's left shoulder, with a black vest top and dark hair visible.

Red bow tattoo on a shoulder

Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A solid red bow with three rounded loops is outlined in a bold black line on the top of the shoulder. The flat red fill and clean outline give it a simple, graphic look, with a small highlight visible on the centre knot. The photograph is taken indoors against a striped shower curtain, with the subject's dark hair and black top filling the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Okonedo had been selling ribbon across the counter of Pell's Haberdashery for thirty-one years, and she could tell a bow was badly tied from the door. The girl who came in on a wet Thursday in March had her hand in her coat pocket, holding a scrap of red grosgrain that had frayed to a tassel at one end. "It came off my mother's parcel," she said, and laid it on the wood like evidence.

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Mrs Okonedo measured it against the brass rule without asking anything else. Four inches, she decided, and a half for the knot. She pulled a length from the bolt on the top shelf, the red so bright it looked wet under the strip light, and sat at the sewing table with her spectacles down her nose. Three loops, one over the other, the ends tucked under like rabbit ears she had been folding since she was a girl in Lagos. She stitched the centre knot twice so it would hold.

The girl watched her hands the whole time. When the bow was finished Mrs Okonedo ran a thumb across the middle loop and found the seam had gone straight. "There," she said. "Now it's as neat as the day it was bought."

The girl paid in coins, counted out to the penny, and at the door she turned and looked back at the counter as if she had forgotten something. Mrs Okonedo did not offer it for free. She had learned that people kept things better when they had paid for them.

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