Black and grey shaded drawing of a bow with two loops and two trailing ribbon tails on a white background, a flash design with no body placement shown.

Shaded bow design in black and grey

Black and grey · Flash

A line drawing of a bow with two large looped sections, a central knot and two long trailing ribbon ends. Bold black outlines are paired with soft grey airbrush-style shading that darkens toward the centre of each loop and along the ribbon folds. The design is centred on a plain white background with no body visible.

Bow Ribbon

Find an artist for this

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

By the third week of October the big top had more patches than canvas, and Mr Harrow had stopped asking me to mend them. I kept the black silk in a biscuit tin under my cot, the last length from the costume we never finished, and every night I measured it against the ringmaster's tails to see whether there was enough left for one small thing that mattered.

Keep reading

There was a bow for the tightrope boy's hair, which he had lost in Bristol when the wind took his cap and most of his nerve with it. I cut the silk on the bias so it would hold its shape, pulled out two loops, and bound the knot with thread the colour of stewed tea. I dyed the loops twice in the tub behind the horse box, once for the damp and once because the first dye ran, so they shaded darker toward the middle like a pair of wings folding in on themselves.

He came to the wagon steps at dusk, hands raw from the cold, and watched me tie it. He didn't say thank you. He asked whether the ribbon ends would hang long enough to catch the wind on the high wire, and I told him that was the whole point of ribbons.

The last show ran to half a house in Swindon. Afterwards the tent came down in a sensible order, pole by pole, and nobody cried in front of anybody else. I found a note in my apron pocket in his square handwriting: Keep the other loop for yourself. I did. It sits on the lid of the biscuit tin now, gone the colour of weak tea, and it still holds its shape.