Pen sketch of a tattoo design showing a safety pin with a bow and two lettered ribbons, drawn on paper with no body part visible.

Safety pin and bow with lettered ribbons

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn pen sketch of a safety pin with a bow tied around its middle, with two ribbon tails hanging below. The ribbons carry lettering that runs along their length, and the bow has light hatched shading. The drawing is black ink on pale paper, with a small motion line near the top left.

Lettering Bow Ribbon Lettering Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The galley on the Morven Rose smelled of burnt onions and wet wool the morning Cal came down the ladder with his cuff hanging off by a thread. He'd caught it on the winch hook, and the whole sleeve had gone loose at the seam. 'Put it on the side,' I said. 'I'll sort it before the fry-up goes cold.'

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I keep a tin of safety pins in the drawer beside the bread knife, and a spool of ribbon from the chandler in Fraserburgh that I bought for the Christmas raffle and never got round to using. I pinned the torn cuff closed with the brass pin that came off my mother's coat, then tied a bow around its middle, because a bare pin looks like something you'd lose on a lad's jumper and I wasn't having that. Two tails, one red, one navy. I wrote names on them in biro while the kettle boiled: RYAN for Ryan Lowe, who taught Cal the knots, and the other for the boy who'd gone home to his mum in Lerwick and never sent a card.

Cal stood there turning his wrist like it was a present. 'You've made me look like a birthday cake,' he said.

He wore it all week. By Sunday the whole crew had started calling it his medal, and nobody asked where the ribbons came from, because by then we'd all stopped pretending we didn't know.