Close-up photograph of a colour American flag tattoo on the upper back, with words such as duty, country and honour in black lettering across it.

American flag with words on a shoulder blade

Lettering · Back · Mixed · Photo

A partly visible American flag, with stripes and stars shaded in red, blue and grey, sits on the upper back. Black lettering in mixed sizes, including serve, defend, duty, bravery, country and sacrifice, runs across and below the flag, with a cluster of stars at the bottom. The image is cropped tightly, so the composition is shown from the shoulder area only.

Lettering Back American flag Star Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell, the bunting in the Tollard village hall came down twice before the vicar arrived, and your cousin Dev stood on a plastic chair with a roll of gaffer tape, swearing he would not be the one to explain it to the bride. Somebody had pinned a paper sign to the cake table that said SERVE, DEFEND, in capitals so careful they looked like they'd been measured.

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Uncle Walt had brought his old flag, the one that hung in his hallway for forty years, and laid it across the back of the top table like a tablecloth nobody could quite fold. He'd asked for a minute before the speeches. We all assumed it would be a toast. Instead he stood up with his reading glasses on his nose and read the words off the card in his hand: duty, honour, bravery, country. He stopped at country and looked at the card for so long that the room went quiet and Ruth from the Women's Institute reached for her handbag.

Then Dev's littlest, Sadie, who had been under the table with a bowl of crisps, shouted "COUNTRY!" at the top of her lungs, and the whole hall roared. Walt laughed until he had to take his glasses off and wipe them on his tie.

Afterwards he folded the flag into a tight triangle, the way they teach you, and handed it to the groom without a word. Then he came over to me by the urns and said, "Make sure he keeps it out of the sun, or the blue goes first." I told him I would. I am writing to you because I think you should know that he meant the flag, and he didn't.