Heart and rose with MUM banner on wrist
Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo
A red heart outlined in black holds a shaded rose, and a black-outlined banner across the heart reads MUM. The rose and heart are filled with red ink and grey shading, with dark leaves tucked behind the banner. The tattoo sits centrally on the inner forearm against a plain, softly lit background.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
You are seventeen, and the tattooist above Pell's barber shop in Marlow Cross wants a shilling more than you have. Sid Coombes sketches a heart on tracing paper while the wireless downstairs plays dance music and a customer complains about the price of hair oil. "Who's it for, then?" he asks, not looking up. "My mum." He grunts, dips the needle, and says nothing else for the next hour.
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The rose was his idea. He shades it red and grey with the patience of a man roofing a chapel, and you watch the dark leaves go in behind the ribbon one stroke at a time. Your mother has run the post office counter for twenty-two years and never once asked anyone for anything. She would sooner go without her tea than mention it. So you tell yourself this is a kindness, and you keep telling yourself on the walk home past the gasworks, practising the sentence you will say.
She doesn't scold. She is at the kitchen table with the rent book when you come in, and you hold out your wrist without a word. She turns it under the bulb, her thumb resting just beside the lettering, and her mouth tightens. "Roses have more petals than that," she says. Then she fetches a pencil from the drawer, licks the lead, and sketches the missing petal on the back of the rent envelope, round and careful, the way she writes the Christmas cards each December.
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