Close photo of a small, thin-lined blue ribbon tattoo on the inner wrist, shown in a fine line style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small blue ribbon on the inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A small ribbon outline sits on the inner wrist, drawn in a thin, single blue-purple line with a looped top and two loose tails. The ink is slightly soft at the edges, and the skin is pale against a plain white background. The tattoo sits near the centre of the frame, with the rest of the forearm cropped out.

Fine line Forearm Ribbon Awareness ribbon Outline

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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

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the fire, because this is the tale of Mother Hesketh and the blue ribbon of Lower Ambry, and it is older than the bridge you crossed coming in.

Keep reading

Hesketh was a ribbon-maker, and every tailor in the kingdom bought her tails of blue silk by the arm's length. When a soldier rode out to the northern passes, she would tie a small loop around his wrist, two loose ends hanging down like a sparrow's tail. The loop meant one thing: come back and untie it yourself. Nobody was ever to cut it, not the surgeon, not the priest, not the wind if it came to that.

She kept a ledger of every loop she tied, forty-one in all, and beside each name she wrote the date and nothing else. The ink faded and she wrote over it. Then one wet spring a boy came down from the pass with his loop still on, grey with dust and tight as a drum skin. He stood in her doorway and held out his wrist, and she saw that he had not once loosened it on the road, not to wash, not to eat, not even to sleep.

Hesketh did not untie it. She took the ledger down, found the boy's line, and wrote beside it in her old hand: returned. Then she tied a fresh loop around her own thin wrist, and sat down by the window to wait for whoever rode next.