Two black and grey bow tattoos on the backs of the thighs of a person lying face down on a bed in underwear.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two bow tattoos on the thighs

Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

Two bow tattoos sit on the backs of the thighs, each drawn with a ribbon loop and tails in soft grey shading. The person lies face down on a rumpled bed with their face out of frame, and the photograph is framed tightly on the thighs and lower back.

Thigh Bow Ribbon

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had sealed the lane by the time Mam found the ribbons in the bottom of the tack box. Two of them, grey as wet slate, tied in the loose loops she used for the Christmas puddings. I was nine and had been told the box was for harness only, so I hid them under my jumper and carried them up to the top field, where the ewes were starting to lamb early.

Keep reading

Dad was out with the quad, breaking ice on the trough. I sat on the gate, tied one ribbon round the gatepost, then the other round my wrist, pulling the tails tight the way Nan had shown me with shoelaces. The bows looked like something a magpie would bring home. I told the ewes they were prize rosettes. The old black-faced one with the torn ear stared at me and kept chewing.

When the lamb came that night, backwards and limp, it was Dad who knelt in the straw, but I held the lantern and kept the ribbon on my wrist. He worked the little body until it coughed, then breathed, and he laughed and said the lamb was a fighter. I untied the ribbon and looped it round the mother's neck, and she wore it for a fortnight, grey against the wool, until the spring rain rotted it off in the gateway.

I still have the other one. Some winters I take it out and tie it to nothing at all, just to remember the night the farm needed both of us.