Black and grey tattoo of a shield-shaped design with overlapping ribbon-like forms, shaded, on a limb above a striped sock cuff.

Shield with overlapping ribbon forms in grey

Calf · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a shield-shaped outline filled with overlapping, ribbon-like shapes that twist and layer over one another. The linework is bold and dark, with soft grey shading that gives the forms depth and highlights. The design sits on bare skin with light body hair, and a white and navy striped sock cuff and an outdoor setting appear in the background.

Calf Shield Ribbon Abstract

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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

You are sent to the ribbon mill at Holcombe the week the boiler fails, because Mr Pardoe says a boy with clean hands is wanted at the looms, and it is you who has them. The floor smells of warm size and machine oil. Bobbins clatter like a crowd of small men applauding. Nobody tells you what the ribbons are for, only that they must lie flat, never kinked, and that the shield-shaped card goes on the board before anything else.

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By the third week you can tell a good selvedge by touch. Your job is to lay the finished lengths on the cutting table, fold them over one another in the pattern Mrs Oakes has drawn on squared paper, and pin them down so they overlap like pennants in a wind that isn't there. She calls it the crest. Every summer the Holcombe Silver Band marches behind it at the carnival, and every summer somebody says it looks like a bird that has been folded too many times.

On the Friday before the carnival, the board goes missing from the back room. You find it at the canal bridge, face down in the weeds, the ribbons soaked and curling at the edges. Mrs Oakes doesn't shout. She sits on the bottom step and asks you to fetch the iron, and you understand she is not angry with the river, only tired of starting over.

You pin the first ribbon back down that evening under the bare bulb, one fold at a time, until the shape holds. Outside, the band is practising the same tune again, badly, and somewhere down the lane a dog barks in time with the drum. When you finally lift your hands the crest is dry and flat, and the shadows you have pressed into the grey card look, for the first time, like they belong there.