Black and white photo of a small, thin-lined ribbon tattoo on the inner forearm near the wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small ribbon tattoo on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close black and white photograph of an inner forearm and wrist with a small ribbon outline tattoo positioned towards the wrist. The ribbon is drawn with fine, even black linework, with a looped top and two trailing ends, and it is solid black with no shading. The skin is pale and the composition is centred on the tattoo against a soft, grey background.

Fine line Forearm Ribbon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every year the old schoolmaster's daughter came back to Holm Cross for the reunion, and every year she walked the long way round by the mill race, because that was where the ribbons were. Nobody in the village could say who first tied a strip of black silk to the railings there. It was simply done, the way the church bell was rung on a Sunday, and when the silk frayed or the wind took it, somebody else knotted a new length on.

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The year the school closed, the class of forty-one met in the hall with its trestle tables and its smell of floor polish. Tom Farrow brought a tin of biscuits nobody wanted. Mary Lowe had written a list of who was dead and who had gone to Canada, and she read it out before anyone had a drink, because she said if they didn't say the names first they would spend the evening pretending. They said the names. Then the urn boiled and the talk got loud again.

Near midnight Ada Penrose, who had never once been asked to speak at a reunion, walked out to the mill race with a reel of ribbon in her coat pocket. The rails were bare. She had been meaning to see to it for a month. She cut a length with her teeth and tied it in a double loop, the way her mother had shown her with bootlaces, and pulled the two ends long so they would flutter when the cold came off the water.

In the morning the reunion people walked past on their way to the station. Someone stopped, touched the knot, and said nothing. That was how the village kept its ribbons: a bit of silk on iron, and the understanding that somebody would come back and see to it.