Small red bow tattoo with white polka dots on the upper arm of a person wearing a black polka-dot top against a dark background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red polka-dot bow on upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A small red bow with white polka dots sits on the outer upper arm, with its two loops and trailing ribbon ends clearly outlined. The bow is filled with solid red and white dots, with soft shading on the folds. It is set against bare skin and a black background, with a black polka-dot garment at the left edge of the frame.

Upper arm Bow Polka dot Ribbon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The carrier's wife tied the first bow on the mesquite by the dry well the week her husband walked out past it and did not return. She cut the ribbon from her Sunday skirt, red cotton with white dots where the dye had been pinched away, and knotted it in two loops with the ends trailing towards the road, so a man on foot could see it from a mile off.

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Drovers and mail riders saw it and knew there was water under the stones. They tied their own scraps beside it: blue wool, a strip of yellow silk from a dead man's coat, once a child's hair ribbon bleached nearly white. By the second summer the tree hung like a Christmas tree, and the hot wind knocked the loops together until the whole thing rattled like small bells.

A surveyor named Tobias Rennick came through in a motor car that spring. He laughed at the ribbons, called them rubbish for simple folk, and drove straight through the gap in the stones to prove the well was dry. The sand took his back wheels. He walked the three miles to Coyle Creek with his boots in his hand, and the following year he wrote to the council asking why nobody had ever fenced the place.

The council never sent a fence. When the old carrier's wife grew too stiff to ride out, her granddaughter took over the round, cutting the faded bows from the thorn and tying fresh red ones at the top where the road could see them. The water is still there, and every spring someone new knots a bow on the mesquite and leaves the ends pointing west.