Close-up photo of an awareness ribbon tattoo with a black outline and watercolour-style fills in pink, blue, teal, purple and orange, with splashes around it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour awareness ribbon on skin

Other · Colour · Photo

A looped awareness ribbon is outlined in black with bold, unbroken linework, and its loops are filled with soft washes of pink, blue, teal, purple and green. Orange, red, teal and purple splashes and drips spread around the ribbon, with a thin red drip running down from its base. The ribbon fills most of the frame against plain, lightly lit skin.

Other Ribbon Awareness ribbon Splashes Drip

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dad painted the roses on every boat he ever owned, but the Mary Ann had a ribbon on her cabin side, and that was Mum's doing. She stood on the towpath with a pot of cadmium red and a brush wrapped in string, telling him the loops needed to go wider so the light could get through them.

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We were moored at the bottom of the Hatton flight, where the lock keepers hang their washing. Mum wanted a ribbon in every colour the paint tin had, the pinks and teals and that bruised purple, and Dad said the black outline would hold them in the way a fence holds sheep. She said that was the point of an outline, to make you decide where the colour stopped.

The splashes came later, when the pots went over in a squall on the Oxford Canal. Orange ran into the green, red crept down the planks, and Mum laughed and said the boat looked as if it had been dipped in a sunset. Dad never repainted it. He left the drip, one thin red line running from the base of the ribbon towards the waterline, and when I asked why, he said a thing should be allowed to finish its own sentence.

Last spring I took the Mary Ann down the flight alone for the first time. Locks are slow work on your own. At Hatton I stood on the gate beam, wound the paddle up and watched the water boil under the bow. The loops on the cabin caught the low sun, and for a moment the whole ribbon seemed to lift off the wood and float ahead of me, its colours running together in the wake like wet paint in a jam jar.