Close-up of a watercolour-style ribbon tattoo in blue, purple and pink with splashes of colour on the left side of a person's ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour ribbon on ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

A ribbon outline is shaded with soft blue, lilac and magenta tones, with loose splashes of colour around it. The ribbon is shown on the side of the ribs, with a black top and a hand visible at the upper edge of the frame. The shading is soft and blended, and the colours fade into the skin with a painterly effect.

Ribs Ribbon Awareness ribbon Splash Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had got into my father's tins again, so the blue came out the colour of dishwater and the lilac went thin as skimmed milk. Mags Penrose stood under the net loft eaves with her hands in her oilskin and watched me stir, said I could do better, which was true, and that she wanted it on the Dorothy Jane by Friday, which was not.

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She wanted a ribbon, loose and looping, like the ones the Co-op women had been pinning to their coats since spring. I told her I painted boats, not bunting. She said a hull was only a hull until somebody decided what it meant, then unrolled a strip of silk the colour of a bruise and laid it across my bench like a dare.

So I did it my way. I drew the loop in pencil, let the blue run into the wet lilac at the edges, and flicked magenta from a loaded brush so it spattered the planking like spray off the breakwater. Where the colours met they went soft and gave up their edges, the way the sea does with the sky. I worked through the afternoon while the gulls fought over the bins, and when I held it up in the grey light it looked less like a ribbon than something the tide had left behind on purpose.

The Dorothy Jane went out on Thursday and came back on Saturday with nobody aboard but Mags's brother, sunburnt and sheepish, stepping onto the slip with a fish box and a grin. Mags didn't speak. She walked past the boat to the iron bollard by the chandlers, untied the silk from her wrist and knotted it round the post, the ends already fraying in the wind off the harbour. My saucer still holds a thumb of blue that never went chalky.