Close-up of a thigh with a blue Spanish script quote and a shaded blue bow tattoo, partly cropped at the left edge.

Spanish script quote and blue bow on the thigh

Lettering · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A partly cropped Spanish phrase in fine, flowing script runs across the outer thigh, with the left-hand words cut off by the frame. A blue bow with light shading sits at the right end of the lettering, and the ink appears as a single blue tone against lightly freckled skin.

Lettering Thigh Script Quote Text Bow Ribbon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dance hall at Villaverde had a floor of worn oak and a fiddler who never tuned before he played, so the first tune always sounded like a door opening. Marisol sewed ribbons for the girls who came to it, and by the spring of that year she had sewn a blue bow for every one of them except herself. Her mother said this was pride. Her friend Rosa said it was because she was waiting for someone to ask.

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The someone was Ignacio, who drove the mule cart from the quarry and smelled of wet stone. He asked her on the last Saturday of April, and she said yes before he had finished the sentence. She tied a blue bow in her hair that night and did not take it out for three weeks. In June he took the train to Bilbao for work on the ships, and he promised to send for her by autumn. She told him she would be there, and she was, at the hall every Saturday, dancing with whoever asked and saying nothing about the empty place at the edge of the floor.

Autumn came and no letter came with it. Marisol went on dancing. Somewhere in the winter she noticed she could only hear the fiddler properly when she was not thinking of him. She said as much to Rosa over the bread oven, and Rosa only shrugged and said the old women had always known it: you learn to love what you have before life teaches you what you have lost.

Ignacio came back the next spring with a cough and no ring. He stood at the edge of the floor where he had always stood. Marisol was dancing with the fiddler's son, and when she saw him she lifted one hand, the way you greet a neighbour, and kept turning. The bow slid from her hair and dropped onto the boards. Nobody picked it up. Ignacio did, and he kept it in his coat for the rest of his life, and he never once asked her to dance again.