Two shaded black and grey bow tattoos sit on a woman's thighs, with a colour tattoo partly visible on the right thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Twin bow tattoos on thighs

Thigh · Mixed · Photo

The photo is rotated on its side and shows a woman's upper legs with a teal top or shorts at the hips and hands resting on the fabric. Two matching bow tattoos are shaded in soft greys with defined outlines and highlights, one on each thigh. A partly visible colour tattoo, with teal and red tones, appears at the right edge of the upper thigh.

Thigh Bow Ribbon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fence at the bend past Caliche Wells had been wrapped in ribbon for as long as anyone on the county road could remember, faded satin in every colour the sun hadn't yet bleached out. My uncle Desmond used to say the first strip was tied by a woman whose husband drove his truck into the wash in 1958, and that every bow after was a letter addressed to him. I didn't believe him. I was seventeen and believed mainly in the petrol station's cola.

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The summer I turned eighteen I worked the till at that station, and every Thursday a grey Buick pulled in at four. A man with a pencil behind his ear bought two litres of water and a single spool of black ribbon. He never said who it was for. He tied the bow himself out on the fence, pulling the loops tight with his teeth, then stood with his hands in his pockets as if waiting for a bus that wouldn't come.

In August he didn't come. That evening I drove out in the old pickup with a spool of my own, grey from the haberdasher's in Barstow, because it was the only colour I could find that didn't look like a party. His bow was already on the post, one edge lifted where the wind had worked at it, and under a stone beside it lay a folded slip of paper. It said only: Tie the other side. He had left me the far loop.

So I did. I knotted my grey ribbon to the empty post across the road, pulled the loops even, and when I stepped back the two bows faced each other over the tarmac like wings that had decided not to fly. I drove home with the window down. Nobody has ever asked me what the second bow was for, and I have never needed to explain it.