Pen sketch of a safety pin with a bow and two ribbons carrying lettering, drawn as a tattoo design with no body placement shown.

Safety pin and bow sketch

Black and grey · Flash

A pen drawing of a safety pin with a tied bow hanging from its clasp, with two ribbon tails. The linework is fine and sketched, with hatching on the bow loops and pin body. The ribbons carry lettering that is not clearly legible, and the drawing is shown in black ink on a pale background.

Bow Ribbon Lettering Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had never once asked me why the pin on his habit was always a different size from the one before. He simply held out his sleeve in the laundry on Thursdays and waited, the way the old stones in the cloister wait for rain. I kept a tin of safety pins under the ironing board, bent and straightened and bent again, and a reel of grey ribbon that Sister Oda said was for the candle wicks, which was a lie I told the abbot every month.

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The bow was my own trick. When the cord on the bell-rope frayed, I tied a loop of ribbon round the pin so that a hand could find it in the dark. Anselm laughed at it. He said a pin with a bow was the only vanity permitted between these walls, and that God would forgive a little frivolity in a man who had mended his own shroud twice. I told him to hush before the novices heard.

The ribbon tails carried words I had stitched in the winter of the flood, when the chapel roof gave way and we had nothing but ink and thread. I wrote them in the wrong order on purpose, so that only the one who needed them would read them straight. Anselm died in March, in the infirmary chair by the window. The Thursday after, I found his sleeve folded on the drying rack with a single pin through the cuff, the bow still tied, and I left it there for a week before I could bring myself to unpick it.