Black line drawing of two crossed revolvers framed by roses and ornamental scrollwork, shown as a flash design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crossed revolvers with roses

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

The design shows two revolvers crossed in an X shape, with a rose at each side and a scrolled ornamental border. The linework is bold and uniform in black on a white background, with the grips and cylinders filled in with decorative swirl patterns. It is a flat, symmetrical composition with no shading or colour.

Traditional Revolver Gun Rose Scrollwork Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Maud kept the lock at Shallow Ford, and the two barges that came up the river every spring belonged to brothers who had not spoken since their mother's funeral. Each brother swore the other had sold the family cutter. Each wanted the lock toll for himself, and each kept a pair of revolvers wrapped in oilcloth under his bunk, as bargemen did when the river was lawless.

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One April evening, with the water high and brown, both barges tied up at the lock gate at the same moment. Maud came out with her lantern and found them standing on opposite banks, glaring across the sluice. She did not take sides. She took a tin from the windowsill, full of the pink paper roses her husband had folded for her before he drowned, and set them on the wet stones between the two men. "The river has had enough of your quarrels," she said. "Settle it the way the water does, slow and in turn."

They did not understand her, so she showed them. She worked the paddles, let the first barge through, then the second, each waiting its turn, and the gate closed behind them with a sound like a held breath let out. The brothers stood on their gunwales watching each other go, and by the time the lantern had burned down, neither could remember what the argument had been.

In the morning the two revolvers lay rusting in the reeds below the lock, crossed like a pair of hands that had let go. Maud gathered the paper roses from the stones, dried them on the lock house stove, and kept them until the next flood. Bargemen still say that on a quiet night you can hear the lock gate sigh, and that the brothers never spoke again, yet always waited for each other.