Black outline drawing of three stacked ribbon banners with curled tails and hatched shading on their undersides, shown on a plain white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three stacked ribbon banners line drawing

Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing of three ribbon banners stacked diagonally, each with a pointed notched edge and a curled tail at the top and bottom. The thin uniform outlines are filled with short hatched strokes along the lower edges of each ribbon to suggest shading. The drawing is in black ink on white with no colour and sits centrally on the page.

Ribbon Banner Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Sowerby wanted the three banners up on the Corn Exchange railings by Saturday, lettered before the rain came over from the moor. I had the ochre pot open and my brush across my knee when he climbed the ladder with the old pattern under his arm, a sheet of brown paper gone soft at the folds. The notched edges had been cut by his grandfather so the wind would catch on them and the banners would crack like sails, and the curled tails at the top and bottom were hooked so a man could unroll them from either end without tangling his hands.

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I started with the shadows, as he'd taught me. Short hatched strokes along the underside of each ribbon, pressed close and quick, because he said a banner without shadow looks like a lie told by a man with clean hands. The first ribbon I lettered FAIR OF ST ULRIC, the second I filled with the names of the stallholders, and the third he stopped me from touching at all.

'Leave that one,' he said, and sat down on the ladder rung with his cap in his lap. 'My Ruth went down to Hull in March. She said she'd write, and she did, twice. I want the bottom banner empty when they hang it, so anybody who walks under it can put their own word there in chalk.' He pulled the curled tail straight with one finger and watched it spring back. 'Everyone leaves something unfinished at a fair.'

We hung them at noon. The wind came off the moor exactly as he'd promised, lifting the top two ribbons and snapping them taut, while the lowest one hung still with its tail curled like a question. By dusk there was chalk on it: a heart, a boat, a single name in a child's hand. I climbed up in the dark and added nothing, and left the empty space for whoever came next.