Close view of a small black dotwork bow tattoo on the inner forearm near the wrist, with a hand resting on a white top beside it.

Small dotted bow on the wrist

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small bow shape is tattooed on the forearm close to the wrist, drawn as a single outline built from separate black dots. The bow is shown in solid black with no shading, sitting alone against bare skin. A gold filigree ring is worn on the middle finger, and a white top and dark jeans fill the rest of the frame against a pale wall.

Dotwork Forearm Bow Ribbon Wrist Hand Ring

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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 yourselves down, the pair of you, the bride is late and the cake will keep. You want the story of the bow? It was never a bow to start with. It was a row of pinpricks in a sheet of brown paper, a dressmaker's pattern my mother kept in the drawer under the buttons. Winnie Hadley brought it in the spring of 1951, cut from her late aunt's curtains and altered to fit a girl who had never been fitted for anything in her life.

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Winnie's wedding was four days off when the rain got into the shop. The pattern went soft, the chalk bag split, and the only thing left to mark her sleeve was the dots. My mother pounced the paper with blue chalk, patted it through the holes, and up came a bow, dotted and neat as a sampler. Winnie laughed so hard she had to sit on the cutting table. 'Nobody will see it,' she said. 'It's only for me.'

On the morning of the wedding the sleeve ribbon was missing, and the groom's brother was sent running down Mill Lane with a pair of scissors and a torn half-crown. He came back with a length of cream silk that had been meant for a christening. My mother tied the bow at the church door with her own two hands, and the vicar waited, and nobody said a word about the rain.

So when you see that little bow on a stranger's wrist, don't think it's a fancy thing. It's just what's left when you prick a pattern and let the chalk do the rest. The paper's still in the drawer, mind. It's the holes that have lasted.