Small black and grey bow tattoo with shaded ribbon tails on the upper back, below the nape of the neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small bow tattoo on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A small bow with two looped petals and two trailing ribbon tails is tattooed centrally on the upper back. The design uses dark outlines with soft grey shading to give the ribbon volume, and it is set against a plain skin tone. The subject is framed from behind, with dark hair at the top and a navy top at the bottom of the frame.

Back 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 learn to tie a bow with one hand while the other holds the spool steady, because the loom on Carrow Ring hums at a pitch that makes your fingers drift. Mrs Adeyemi taught you that the loop must sit just above the knot, like a breath held before speaking. Nobody on the ring wears silk any more. The last mulberry bolt came up on the supply run the year you turned nine, and since then the bows have been spun from waste fibre and dyed the grey of old pewter.

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Every departure, the colonists come to the hatch with a single ribbon tied at the nape of the neck, a small thing to show the ground crews which family they belong to. Tying them is your job. Today it is Tomas, who is eleven and furious about it, and whose mother has already gone through the inner lock. You fold the loops twice, make the tails long enough to reach his shoulder blades, and cut the ends on a slant so they will not fray in vacuum.

"Why two tails?" he asks. You tell him the truth you were given: one for the hand that lets go and one for the hand that is held. He thinks about this for a long time, then asks whether the second tail is for you. You do not answer straight away. The hatch cycles, the air hisses out of the lock, and the ribbon ends stream back toward the ring until the dark swallows them. Then you go back to the loom, because the next hatch opens at dawn and the spool is nearly empty.