Traditional style flash drawing of a magenta coffin wrapped in three yellow banners that read LEAVE A PRETTY CORPSE, with bold black outlines.

Coffin with banner reading Leave a Pretty Corpse

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A coffin stands upright, shaded in deep magenta and purple with a wood grain texture on its lid. Three yellow banners wrap around it, each with black outlined capitals reading LEAVE A PRETTY CORPSE. Bold black outlines and flat, solid colour fills on a plain beige background give it the look of a classic flash sheet design.

Traditional Coffin Banner Lettering

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Edna,

Keep reading

You will not believe the fuss at Pell's yard this week. Uncle Ronald's coffin came back from the polisher with the lid bowed and the varnish gone tacky in the heat, and Mr Pell wanted to know if we were still set on the oak. I said we were. Ronald spent forty years saying he wanted to go out in the same wood as his apple ladders, and I was not having him fobbed off with pine.

The orchard is heavy this year. Windfalls are going soft under the Bramleys and the wasps have found the cider barrels already. Every morning I walk the rows with a bucket and my hat pulled low, counting what the wind has taken, and thinking about him standing under those trees telling anyone who'd listen to leave a pretty corpse, because the rest of us would only be sorry for them if they looked a fright.

Mr Pell asked which words Ronald wanted on the lid. I laughed so hard I had to sit on the step. Ronald had a sign painted for the shed years back, LEAVE A PRETTY CORPSE in yellow and black, and he hung it by the gate where the village boys could read it on their way to scrump.

So I've told Pell to paint it on the lid in the old flash letters, three bands wrapped round, like the sign. He thinks I'm soft in the head. Perhaps I am. But when they carry him past the first row on Thursday, I want the wasps to know he had the last word.

Love, Margaret