A tattoo

MuM - Ribbon - Hearts - Doves etc
Seems quite straight forward, form the word mum in ribbon and add some embellishment brainstorm over.

Note to self the 'M's can make good heart shapes

I don't want to leave the impression that research on this exercise is limited.
I did indeed seek out examples of the way that ribbons are represented in tattoo art; mainly online, lots of ankles and calves!
As I was quite set on the idea of mum written in ribbon I gave some thought to tying up the loose ends, so to speak.
When you are not very organised sticky notes are a god send...

Flicking through a supplement, I found some photographs of birds in flight, including an excellent picture of a pair of pigeons.

Not exactly a eureka moment, but certainly one of the shots looked very promising...

I rattled off a quick mock up of how it might look complete with ribbon. The good thing about pigeons in the context of this exercise, is that they look a lot like doves.

I think I can work on something along these lines.

I re-drew the image having added the ends of the ribbon although inadvertently creating 3 ends!?. Having sketched the outline in hard pencil, for what will be the finished piece. I took a look at some tattoo art in an attempt to define a method to adopt for a convincing tattoo style. I chose black fine technical pen.See here for my reference piece.

Initially I dotted the outline with the pen.
Based on the effects in my reference piece, I changed this in favour of a straight forward line.
Then I had to decide on colour. Looking through tattoo examples, it doesn't appear that there is a set style of adding colour in tattooing, it can be partially covered using subtle pale colours to full blown 'blocked in' hues... I favoured some where in between.
My reference piece also gave me the idea of adding some lettering on the ribbon to spell out MUM.