Black and grey shaded bow tattoo with a bold outline on the back of a person's neck, with hair partly visible above it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small bow tattoo on the back of the neck

Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A small bow with a looped top, a central knot and two trailing ends is tattooed on the back of the neck. The outline is bold and the ribbon folds are filled with soft grey shading and darker black accents. The photograph is black and white and centres the tattoo with the hairline and the side of the neck in frame.

Neck Bow Ribbon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Abernethy kept the boarding house at the top of Gull Steps, and every spring she took the good blue ribbon from her sewing box and tied it to the iron gate so the fishermen's wives would know which door was open for the season. The ribbon was the only thing in the house that never faded, she said, because it had been bought from a pedlar who sold nothing else.

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The year the herring failed, a stranger came up the steps with a trunk and no coat. He asked for a room facing the harbour. Mrs Abernethy gave him the attic, which had one window and a bed that sagged in the middle, and asked for nothing but his name. He would not give it. That night he untied the ribbon from the gate and came down to the kitchen with it wound round his fingers, looking for thread.

She told him the ribbon was for bringing boats home. He said a knot will hold, but a bow lets go when it is meant to, and that was the whole trick of it. Then he sat at her table and mended the torn ribbon with a single stitch, and she watched his hands, which were steady and very old.

In the morning the trunk was gone and the gate was tied again, the loops neat, the two ends trailing down toward the stone. The boats came in on the Thursday, every one of them, and nobody in Gull Steps ever asked Mrs Abernethy where the ribbon had come from.