Coloured neo-traditional flash design of a woman in a white dress holding a lantern, with a skull reaper, bee, unicorn, ghostly figures and a Forget Me Not banner.

Bride with reaper, bee and unicorn flash

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A woman in a long white dress and tiara stands at the centre, holding a lantern in one hand and resting the other on her hip, with a hooded skull figure behind her head. Around her are a bee, a rearing unicorn, small ghostly creatures, purple flowers and a scrolled banner reading Forget Me Not, all framed by a dark oval and radiating background lines. Bold dark outlines and rich purple, gold, cream and red fills give the piece a heavy, saturated colour palette.

Neo-trad Bride Woman Skull Bee Unicorn Ghost Flower Banner Lantern Dress

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Ambrose had kept bees at the bottom of Sallow Lane for forty years, and in all that time the reaper had never come to the hives himself. He sent his notices by the bees, the old women said, and you learned to read the change in their humming. This autumn the note dropped low and steady, and Nell knew before the postman reached her gate that someone in the valley had been called.

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The lantern the reaper carried held one small flame, and the flame was the last person still saying your name aloud. Nell had watched it through the glass the night Tom went, and she had watched it shrink every week since, because she could no longer bring herself to say his name over the hedge to anyone. When the reaper finally came up the lane in his tall brown hat, the flame was barely a bead, and he looked at it with something close to pity. He told her the border by the gate was all forget-me-nots, and that without them he had nothing to tie the memory to.

So Nell went out with her trowel in the grey light and dug up every blue-purple bloom she had planted for Tom. She wrapped their roots in her good linen apron and tucked them through the lantern's bars, while the little pale creatures from the orchard wall climbed down to watch, one of them wearing a knitted hat and another with antlers of bent wire. The unicorn that lived in the cider shed stamped once, and the bees came out in a gold cloud and settled on the glass.

In the morning the flame stood tall and clear, and the reaper had gone without a word. Nell walked down to the hives and, for the first time in a year, said Tom's name out loud to the bees, and they hummed it back to her.