Small solid black bow tattoo on the inner wrist of a hand raised against a dark green plant background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small bow tattoo on a wrist

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A small, solid black bow sits on the inner wrist of a raised hand, with the two loops and short tails forming a simple silhouette. The ink is a single dark tone with no shading or colour, and the bow is centred on the wrist. The background is dark foliage with a dark green sleeve at the bottom edge, and the warm lighting gives the skin a reddish cast.

Other Bow Ribbon

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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 find the bow on the first morning, knotted to the iron ring of the chapel door at Harrowcote, where the roof came down in the winter floods and nobody has bothered to clear the nave since. It is black silk gone grey at the loops, tied the way your gran tied parcel string: two loops, two short tails, a knot pulled hard enough to hold against the wind coming off the moor.

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Mr Pargeter, who keeps the key and about forty sheep, says it has been there longer than the council's sign. Children tie things to it, he says. Wishes, or dares. You tell him you are not here for wishes, you are here to measure the arch for the county survey, and he laughs and says everyone who comes to Harrowcote says that by the second cup of tea.

You measure stone all afternoon. Each time the wind shifts the ribbon lifts and settles, and each time your tape snags on it. Near four o'clock you work the knot loose with a pen cap and find, folded inside the loop, a strip of paper torn from a school exercise book. Someone has written in pencil, in careful capitals, MEET YOU UNDER THE BOW. The date is 1961. The handwriting is a child's, and so, you suspect, is the optimism.

At dusk you tie your survey tape back on the ring, a neat loop for each day you will be returning, and you leave the bow where it was, its tails lifting towards the gap in the roof.