Red polka-dot bow tattoo with a black outline on a shoulder, with a black bra strap running beside it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red polka-dot bow on shoulder

Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A flat, cartoon-style bow in red with white dots, outlined in black, sits on the upper shoulder. The shading is minimal, with solid fills and a uniform outline. The bow is centred on the frame, and a black bra strap and grey knitted top appear at the edges.

Shoulder Bow Polka dot Ribbon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Hollin Bottom had seen Ada Penhallow without her red ribbon since the year the lambs came early, so when the thaw brought it back on the washing line behind the dairy, the children ran to tell the vicar it had been found. It was not a ribbon at all, Ada said, but a bow she had cut from her mother's Sunday sash and stitched with white buttons for dots, so it would look like the spots on a toadstool. She wore it knotted at her collar every market day, and she would not say why.

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The winter had taken six ewes in a single week of sleet, and the farm had gone quiet the way houses do after a death. Her brother Tom had gone down to the coast for work and had not written since Martinmas. Ada sat by the range with the bow in her lap and sewed the same loop again and again, the needle going in and out of the red cloth while the kettle ticked on the hob.

On the feast of Saint Brigid the snow stopped and the sky went clear and hard. Ada walked the frozen lane to the crossroads with the bow pinned to her coat. Under the signpost stood a thin lad with a crate of bruised apples and a cough that rattled, asking the way to Hollin Bottom. She gave him the last of her bread and tied the ribbon to the handle of his crate so the farm dogs would know he was expected.

The lad came up the lane at dusk, and Ada did not need the ribbon to know him. She had only to see how he stopped at the gate, the way Tom always had, as if the farm might have shifted in his absence. By the thaw the bow was back on the line behind the dairy, and Tom was the one pegging it there, red against the grey, to show the road was open.