Black linework gravestone tattoo reading DON'T TRY, with a cracked top, a flower and a leaf, in a traditional style on the upper arm.

Gravestone with Don't Try lettering

Traditional · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black gravestone with a cracked top, the words DON'T TRY carved across the face, and a curling sprig with a leaf and a five-petal flower at the base. The outlines are bold and the stone is filled with fine parallel hatching that gives it a woodcut look. The tattoo is in black and grey, with another tattoo partly visible along the bottom edge reading LOOKING FOR A KISS.

Traditional Upper arm Lettering Flower Leaf Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ada Pullen came into the yard on a Tuesday with a rolled sketch under one arm and a deadline in her mouth. Her husband Walter had died at the Feathers in March, she said, and had left instructions. The stone was to be finished by Friday, with the words cut across the face and nothing else on it but a sprig and a flower.

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I asked her what the words meant. She said Walter had spent forty years trying things: the pier at Mablethorpe, a second marriage to a widow from Louth, a greyhound called Optimist that never once came first. "He never did what the sign said," she told me, tapping the drawing. "So the sign goes on him."

I cut the crack first, as the sketch showed, a hairline running down the arch as though the stone had thought better of standing up. Then the letters, slow, the mallet tapping out a rhythm the apprentice swore was a hymn. The sprig went at the base, curling like a question. The flower was her idea. She wanted something that would not need watering.

On the Friday she came back alone and read it twice. Then she laughed until she had to sit on the bench by the gate, wiping her eyes with the back of a glove. "Well," she said at last, "he'd have hated that." I have cut a good many stones since, and every one of them has come out whole, which I put down to not taking commissions from widows with a sense of humour.