Shaded black and grey realism tattoo on an upper arm showing a crown, two roses and a purple ribbon, with the words Strength and Perseverance beneath.

Crown, roses and ribbon on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A shaded crown sits above a large ribbon with a patterned purple fill, flanked by two realistic roses in grey tones. The script words Strength and Perseverance run along the lower arm, and a small faded element appears near the right edge. The image is a close, well-lit photo of the upper arm with a dark background, and the ink is mostly grey with the ribbon adding muted purple.

Realism Lettering Upper arm Crown Rose Ribbon Script Strength

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the urn, Jackie, it's older than the hall," said Dennis, and the room laughed the way old rooms do when the joke is the same one they heard in 1979. He had the microphone in one hand and a cardboard box under his arm, and he set the box on the trestle table between the sandwiches and the squash.

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"Everybody remembers Miss Fairweather's cup," he said. "The one for the rose bed. Nobody remembers who scrubbed the cup." He lifted out a purple satin ribbon gone soft at the edges, pinned to a square of card, and held it up to the light from the high windows. Someone at the back said it was the Whitbury Sports Day ribbon, and somebody else said it was the Queen's Silver one, and they argued about it for a while.

Then he took out a tin crown, its paint worn to bare metal at the points, and a rose cut from a magazine, and laid them beside the ribbon as though dealing cards. "Strength is what you do when the rose goes over," he said, "and perseverance is what you do the next morning, when you pick the next one. Miss Fairweather told us that every Monday for seven years and I thought she was mad." He tapped the card. "She was right, which is worse."

The last thing in the box was a photograph of the school gate, taken in a summer nobody could name. Dennis passed it round the tables without a word. When it reached the far end, a woman who had been dabbing at her eyes with a paper napkin looked at it for a long time, then folded the napkin into a small square and tucked it under the rim of the crown.