Coloured neo-traditional flash design of the Bride of Frankenstein with two ravens, roses and a Never Say Die banner, shown as a drawing with no body placement.

Bride of Frankenstein with ravens and roses

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A green-faced woman with a streaked black and white bouffant hairstyle, stitched neck and a closed-eyed profile sits before a pale full moon. Two black ravens perch on her shoulder and fly beside her, with a red rose at the lower left and another behind the banner. Bold dark outlines and smooth shading sit on a deep blue starry background, with a banner reading Never Say Die across the base.

Neo-trad Raven Rose Moon Star Banner

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mags Thorold was paid in brass and two good hens to make a bride out of what the tide had left at Harrow Fen. The widower Ansel wanted someone to keep his fire lit and his supper hot, and he did not much mind what she was made from. She worked through the wet winter with green salve, copper wire and a long needle that had been her grandmother's, sewing the pieces of three drowned girls into one neck, one jaw and one pair of hands. When the last stitch went in, the bride opened her eyes and asked what the date was.

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Ansel did not like the question. He liked her hair even less, a great black sweep that rose from her head in waves with a pale ribbon wound through it like a gull's wing. He wanted her quiet. She wanted the moon, which hung over the fen like a lamp somebody had forgotten to put out. Each night she sat at the window and called to it, and each night two ravens came down from the reeds and perched on the sill beside her, black as wet slate, watching with pale unblinking eyes.

When Ansel asked what she was muttering, she told him, "Never say die." He took it for a prayer. It was the phrase Mags had stitched into the hem of her own apron, the only thing her maker had left her with. The ravens carried the words out over the marsh the next morning, one to each village, until everyone in Harrow Fen had heard them and nobody could say who had started it.

Ansel found the house empty in spring. The fire was out and the supper lay cold. On the table sat a single red rose and a smear of green salve. Out on the causeway two black birds rose together, one of them carrying a long pale ribbon in its beak, and they flew towards the moon. The fen children still sing about the bride who went up the causeway with the ravens and comes back every night to the window, just to see whether anyone has kept the lamp lit.