Small black outline bow tattoo on the middle finger in fine line style, with turquoise painted nails on the hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small bow tattoo on a finger

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a hand with turquoise painted nails, showing a small tattoo on the middle finger. The tattoo is a simple black outline of a bow with a few short lines rising above it. The linework is thin and even, the ink is solid black with no shading, and the plain background keeps the focus on the tattoo.

Fine line Hand Bow Ribbon Outline

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

Mind the step by the cloakroom, that board's been loose since the war and the council won't pay to fix it. Sit down. You want the ribbon story or the one about the bandleader with the wooden leg? Ribbon, good. Everybody wants the ribbon.

Keep reading

Ada Wrenfield ran the ribbon stall at the Pier Ballroom in the summer of 1951, selling reels of silk off a tray hung round her neck. Girls bought them to tie in their hair, and some bought a length to wind round a finger so they wouldn't lose it in the crush. Harold Pym came in off the boats every Saturday with sea salt in his collar and asked for the same thing each time: one yard of midnight blue, no more, no less. She never asked him why. A man who knows exactly how much he needs is rare enough.

On the last Saturday before the boats went out to the Dogger Bank, he didn't come. She waited through three foxtrots with the blue reel in her palm, then knotted the end around her middle finger in a tight little bow, the way you'd tie a thread to remember a thing, and danced the next set with the stall left unattended. The loose ends lifted each time she turned, two thin tails standing up like a wave crest.

Harold came back in October with a boat's worth of fish money and a cough that never left him. He found her at the stall, looked at the bow still knotted on her finger, and said he'd taken it for a promise. She said it was only a knot. Neither of them believed her. They danced that night with her hand flat against his shoulder, the bow catching the light every time she turned, and the tails rose up the way they always did, as if the ribbon had been waiting all along to be let go.