Realistic red bow tattoo with white polka dots and grey shading on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red polka dot bow on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A close photograph of a bow tattoo with two looped sides and two trailing ends, made of red fabric covered in cream polka dots. The ribbon is shaded with dark grey and soft highlights to suggest folds and volume. The bow is centred on the arm against a plain skin background, with a white top and purple fabric at the edges of the frame.

Realism Forearm Bow Ribbon Polka dot

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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 dress shop on Calder Street closed the week your mother lost the lease, and the last thing anyone sold from it was a reel of red spotted ribbon, four yards left over, which the woman behind the counter wrapped in brown paper and pressed into your hands without asking for money. You carried it home on the bus with your knees against the seat in front. That night you sat on the back step with the garden going blue around you, the runner beans propped on their canes, and you tried to tie the ribbon round the rusted gate latch the way your grandmother used to tie hers to the washing line. It came undone twice. The third time it held, two loops and two trailing ends, and the cream dots looked almost like petals in the dusk.

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Your brother came out in his socks to see what the swearing was about. He said it looked like a pair of ears, or a bird with its wings folded, and you told him it was a bow, obviously, and that bows were for things you wanted to keep. He sat down beside you and pulled one end loose with his teeth. You let him. Neither of you said anything about the house or the men with the clipboard who had been measuring the hallway that afternoon.

In the morning the gate was open and the ribbon lay in the wet grass, one loop still bent into the shape of a heart. You picked it up and found the ends were stiff with dew. You folded it twice, put it in your coat pocket, and went back inside to help carry the boxes down the path.