Traditional tattoo of a guillotine with a Best Wishes banner, flanked by yellow-orange roses and black leaves, on a limb.

Guillotine, roses and a Best Wishes banner

Traditional · Other · Mixed · Photo

A bold black guillotine sits at the centre of the design, with a banner across its frame reading BEST WISHES in black lettering. Two yellow-orange roses with black shading sit on either side, surrounded by black-outlined leaves with hatched shading. The solid black outlines, flat orange fills and heavy black areas are typical of traditional tattooing, and the image is a close, well-lit shot of the skin.

Traditional Other Rose Leaves Banner Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down by the roses, child, and keep your hands out of the bean rows. You see that black frame against the bottom wall? Old Lucien Marchand built it the winter of the bad harvest, when the Marquis still paid him by the blade. He kept the iron sharp and the wood polished, and in forty years he never let a customer leave his yard without a bunch of yellow roses cut from the garden behind the house.

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The trouble came when the Marquis's line ended and the new men arrived with carts to empty every cellar in the valley. Lucien's blade went into the river wrapped in sacking. The frame was too heavy to move, so it stayed where it stood, and the roses climbed it, because roses will climb anything if you leave them alone long enough.

One spring a postman on a red bicycle stopped at the gate with a letter for Lucien's sister, who had buried him the autumn before. Inside was a card with a ribbon printed across the top, and it said only best wishes, signed by a man in Lyon who had once been a boy in the Marquis's kitchen. She kept it in her apron pocket for years, and she never told anyone why she laughed each time she read it.

So when the blossoms come, you cut them for the table, not for the grave. Lucien would have liked that. The frame still stands, the leaves hide the blade, and the roses lean in as if they are listening for a click that never comes.