Pencil sketch of a traditional style tattoo design showing a headstone inscribed Wish You Were Here, a crescent moon, a rose and leaves.

Headstone with rose and crescent moon design

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing on paper of a tattoo design showing a rounded headstone with a small cross above the lettering WISH YOU WERE HERE. A crescent moon sits behind the headstone, and a rose with leaves is drawn in the lower right. The lines are fine and mostly uniform, with light shading on the petals and moon, and the composition is shown at a slight angle.

Traditional Lettering Cross Crescent moon Rose Leaves Lettering

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The function room above the Crown smelled of carvery gravy and somebody's cheap aftershave, and Carol had pinned a photocopied class photo to an easel by the bar. Form 4B, 1987, thirty-one faces. Eleven of them had a thin biro line struck through the name. Nobody had asked her to do that. She'd just done it, the way she did everything, with a Bic and no fuss.

Keep reading

I found Tony Fenwick by the raffle table with his tie loosened, holding a pint he wasn't drinking. We had been the two who got caught smoking behind the bike sheds, and we'd sworn we would never end up in a room like this one. 'Who's left to ask about?' he said. I told him about Mr Hanley, who taught us woodwork and once made the whole class measure the playground for a dinner lady's ashes. Tony laughed too loudly, then stopped, and looked at the photo for a long time.

Carol had a box of blank cards for the committee, the kind with a cartoon robin on the front. Tony took one, drew a grey headstone in biro with a crescent moon behind it and a rose at its foot, then wrote across the stone in careful capitals. He slid it under the frame before anyone noticed. In the morning, when the caretaker stripped the tables, I went back for my coat and found the card face up on the carpet. WISH YOU WERE HERE. Underneath, smaller, in the same careful hand: Save me a seat by the window.