Small shaded blue bow tattoo on the side of a finger, on a hand resting on a plastic-wrapped tattoo chair.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small blue bow tattoo on a finger

Hand · Colour · Photo

A small bow with a pale centre knot is tattooed on the side of a finger. The bow is filled with blue and teal tones, with lighter areas suggesting highlights and soft shading across the loops. The bow sits centrally on the finger against a plain skin background, with a black plastic-wrapped chair and wooden floor visible behind the hand.

Hand 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

You took the ribbon off the spool at Pargeter's because the shop was closing on Saturday, and Mrs Pargeter had said that anything left behind would go in the sea. It was teal silk, the colour of the water past the groyne on a flat morning, and it cost you nothing but a promise to come back and tell her what you had made of it.

Keep reading

The boarding house on Marine Terrace had nine rooms and a landlady called Vera who counted the spoons twice. You worked the breakfast room that October, carrying kippers past guests who never looked up, and every evening you sat on the back step with the ribbon wound round one finger, tugging it into a bow, untying it, tugging again. Vera said it would come to no good. The lodger in number six said it looked like a wounded moth.

On the last Saturday the wind came in off the harbour so hard it lifted the awning over the baker's. You went down to the shop with the bow still tied, meaning to hand it back with an apology, but the door was already boarded and a gull stood on the sign. You stood there a long while, turning the finger in the grey light, until you understood that Mrs Pargeter had never expected the ribbon back at all.

You kept it. Years later you still tie small blue knots without thinking, at bus stops and in the margins of letters, and the gull is still there in your head, watching the sea come in.