Colour tattoo of a heart framing a night camping scene with a tent, campfire, mountains and stars, with the words Beauty for ashes below, in a neo-traditional style on a limb.

Heart with campfire scene and lettering

Neo-trad · Other · Colour · Photo

A heart-shaped frame with a wavy purple and pink border contains a night scene of a tent, a campfire, snow-capped mountains, pine trees, a glowing moon and four-point stars. The tattoo uses bold black outlines with speckled shading in the sky and soft gradients on the tent and mountains. The words Beauty for ashes run in black capitals along the lower edge of the heart.

Neo-trad Lettering Other Heart Campfire Tent Mountain Moon Star Pine tree Camping Night sky Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pull that chair up to the desk, love, the kettle's only just boiled and the corridor lights won't change till three. I'll tell you about Marjorie Quayle, who ran nights on Ward Nine before they put the computers in. She kept a tin of barley sugar in the top drawer and a torn map of the Lake District pinned above the sink, and whenever a bed went quiet at four in the morning she'd tell the porters: go on, then, you've earned a hill.

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Her husband Tom was a fell walker, the sort who knew every tarn by its Sunday name. He went up Helvellyn one February and didn't come down the way he went up. At the funeral she stood at the back of the chapel with the order of service in her fist, and the reading was from Isaiah, beauty for ashes, and she read it out in the flat voice she used for bed numbers. The next weekend she drove to the campsite at Glenridding, pitched his old canvas tent alone in the dark, and built a fire from the sticks he'd left stacked in the shed. She burned every letter he had ever written her, one at a time, and watched the stars come out over the snow line.

Years later, on a frost night, an old man in bed four was going slowly and his daughter couldn't sleep. Marjorie sat with her on the plastic chairs and talked about nothing: the moon, the hills, how the car park looked like icing. At half past four she took her coat and went out the side doors for ten minutes. When she came back her cheeks were red and her hands smelt of woodsmoke, though nothing on the ward had been burning.

The nurses still say she went out for a cigarette. She never smoked. She went to check the moon was still up over the multi-storey, the way you'd check on a fire you'd left going, and to remind herself there was a whole sky out there nobody on the wards could sign for. Drink your tea before it goes cold. Nobody's going to ring the bell for a while yet.