Traditional style flash design of a light blue ribbon banner with the word Survivor in black script, outlined in black on a white background.

Survivor ribbon banner design

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

The design shows a light blue ribbon curling into a loose figure of eight, with the word Survivor written across it in black cursive script. The ribbon has bold black outlines, a white highlight line and dark shading along its folds, with small hatched details at the edges. The plain white background leaves the banner as the only subject.

Traditional Lettering Ribbon Banner Script Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The net loft smelt of tar and wet hemp, and Ruth Caddick had been stitching the same ribbon for an hour before she admitted her fingers were shaking. The silk was pale blue, bought off the chandler's roll with money the crew had scraped together in the Lamb and Flag. She had folded it into a loose figure of eight on the bench, the way she'd fold a sail seam, and kept smoothing the curl flat with the heel of her hand.

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Skipper Joe Pargeter came up the stairs with the wind behind him and stood in the doorway, cap in both hands. He said the Kittiwake had never needed frills, and the men who went down in February had names that deserved the space more. Ruth didn't look up. She said the ribbon wasn't for the men who went down. It was for the ones who came home with a split bow and salt in their beards, so that anyone rowing out past the breakwater would see it on the mast and know the boat had been through something and kept floating.

She wrote the word in black thread, in the copperplate her mother had taught her on the back pages of ledgers. The S took the longest, a swooping double curve that wanted to run off the silk, and she made herself slow down through it. Joe watched without speaking, and when she bit the final thread he moved to the window and held the ribbon up to the grey light.

At first light the Kittiwake slipped her mooring with the blue banner snapping at the masthead, the loops of it turning over the harbour mouth. Ruth stood on the quay with her hands in her apron and watched it until the curl of the ribbon was only a small bright knot against the sea.