Coloured flash design of a sword, pipe, staff and cloak among leaves, with a yellow banner reading Home is behind the world ahead, in a neo-traditional lettering style.

Banner lettering with sword and pipe design

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

The design shows a sword angled through a bundle of leaves and foliage, with a curled pipe, a wooden staff and a draped grey cloak around it. Two yellow banners cross the lower half, carrying the lettering Home is behind the world ahead in a calligraphic script. The linework is fine and dark, with soft watercolour-style washes of green, yellow, blue and brown filling the shapes.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pipe was still warm when Mam pressed it into my hand, which was the only thing about that morning that felt like it belonged to anyone. Dad had smoked it on the back step every evening since the colliery shut, watching the slag heap go green in the rain, and nobody had moved it from the sill since the funeral. I wrapped it in my good scarf and laid it in the holdall beside the ash walking stick he'd cut the year I was born.

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Mr Pryce from the Institute walked me down to the bus at Gelder Bank, carrying the old pageant sword over his shoulder because he said a lad shouldn't leave without a blade, even a tin one with a chipped hilt. He didn't say much. At the stop he pulled Dad's waxed coat from his own arm, where he'd been keeping it, and buttoned it onto me without asking. It smelled of oil and tobacco and the lamp room, and it was too big in the shoulders.

The bus climbed out of the valley past the wheel-head and the chapel and the rows of blackened doors. From the top window I could see the whole village folding itself small under the cloud. I didn't cry. I sat with the stick across my knees and the sword wedged in the luggage rack, and I held the pipe in my fist until the stem left a dent in my palm.

At the summit the driver shut the engine off to let it cool and the quiet came in through the open door. Ahead the road ran off wide and grey towards the sea, with nothing standing on either side of it. I stood, pulled the holdall onto my shoulder, and for the first time in a fortnight I looked forward.

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