Traditional style flash design of a grenade with a beaded pull ring chain, a red flower with green leaves, and the words GOOD LUCK, drawn on a tan paper background.

Grenade with flower and good luck script flash

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A drawn tattoo design showing a dark brown grenade with a gold cap and a beaded chain ring, set beside a red five-petal flower, a green leafy stem and a curled black tendril. The words GOOD LUCK sit to the right, with a red strike-through band behind them and a black swirl beneath. Bold black outlines, flat colour fills in red, green, brown and gold, and a blue outline around the grenade give it a classic old-school look on a tan paper ground.

Traditional Flower Leaves Chain Script Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sergeant's son came home from the valley with a grenade he had been told was dead, and he kept it on the windowsill of the cooper's house in Ashby Fold because he could not bring himself to throw it in the river. Every morning his mother watered the geranium beside it and every morning she said the same thing, that a thing which has been holding its breath for a year will not stop just because you ask it to. Nobody in the Fold argued with her. They had all lost someone to something that was meant to be finished.

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In April the chain on its cap began to rust through, and the boy took it down to Harker's forge to have the ring mended. Harker turned it over twice in his blackened hands, looked for a long moment at the pale rind of the casing where the brown had gone soft as cork, and said that a wise man lays a dead thing on the flagstones and walks away. The boy said he had no wise men in his family, only a dog and a geranium. Harker laughed until he had to sit down on the anvil.

They buried it in the bog behind the chapel that same afternoon, wrapped in a flour sack and a red cloth from the altar, and planted a single poppy above it because poppies were what grew best in that ground. Years later people said the flower came up stranger than any other in the county, with the petals too stubborn and the stem too green. Harker's grandson swore it had written two words on the sack before it rotted, though nobody could read them, and so the Fold took the flower as a kind of message and called it good luck, which was all any of them had ever wanted.