Close-up of a hand holding a turquoise mug, with a small fine-line red bow tattoo on a finger and a silver flower ring on another.

Small red bow tattoo on a finger

Fine line · Hand · Colour · Photo

A hand grips a turquoise ceramic mug, with a small red bow tattooed on the side of one finger. The bow is drawn in thin, single-weight red linework with a simple loop and two trailing ends, and there is no shading. A silver flower ring sits on a neighbouring finger, and the blurred background shows a person with long brown hair.

Fine line Hand Bow Ribbon Hand Mug

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

Late August at Hallam's, and the Conference pears are heavy enough to bend the wires. You are standing on the third rung of the ladder with a reel of red garden twine in your coat pocket, tying bows on the low branches the way Mrs Ferris taught you the summer you were eleven. One loop, two trailing ends, nothing you cannot undo with a single pull. She said a knot should always be something a person could change their mind about.

Keep reading

Nobody in the village could say how long the trees had been marked that way. The bows told the pickers which rows were promised to the shop in Ledbury, which to the cider man, and which were spoken for by nobody at all, so anyone could take a fallen pear home for a pie. You learned to read them before you learned your letters properly. Red meant wait. A double bow meant the wasps had got there first.

This morning the lane was full of wagons and the wasps were drunk on windfalls, and you tied three new bows before breakfast without asking anyone. Mrs Ferris would have tutted and then laughed. The twine was loose on the reel and the sun came through the leaves in long bars, and each bow lifted a little in the air as you moved past it.

At dusk you walked the rows once more, giving each bow a tug to check it would come apart. Every one gave way in your fingers the way it was meant to, and you left them where they fell in the grass for the next person to decide.