Traditional-style flash design of a red rose, two headstones with carved busts, clasped hands, a shovel and a banner reading Forever True.

Forever True flash with rose and headstones

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

The design shows a red rose with green leaves at the centre, with two headstones bearing carved busts of a woman and a man above it. Two hands reach towards each other between the stones, one holding a ring, and a shovel stands to the right on a mound of earth. Bold black outlines, solid fills and soft shading give it a classic look, with a pink halo behind the stones and a banner across the bottom reading FOREVER TRUE.

Traditional Rose Hand Ring Banner Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Her husband had been dead eleven weeks when the new lodger came up the steps of Hallam's boarding house with a trunk and a spade strapped to the side of it. Mrs Pilling asked what the spade was for. He said he dug graves for the parish at Cold Harbour, and that he boarded in town each winter when the frost made the chalk too hard to open.

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Every evening after that he sat in the front parlour and talked about the sea wall and the price of coal, and the widow listened, because nobody in Saltcote had asked her a question since the funeral. By Michaelmas she had a ring on the mantel that she would not wear and would not throw away. He asked her once what it was for. She said it was for the next man fool enough to ask, and he laughed so hard he had to set his cup down on the rug.

When the first hard frost came he walked up to the churchyard with his spade, as he always did, and opened the ground beside her husband's stone. He dug it neat and square and deep enough for two, then came back down the hill with the chalk still on his boots. The parish clerk found the stone the following spring, its two names cut in the same careful hand, and the widow's name was still unfinished.

The spade was left leaning by Hallam's back door. The ring was gone from the mantel, and nobody in Saltcote ever saw the lodger again, though the widow wore a ring after that and walked the sea wall every evening with her hand in the crook of an arm.