Pencil sketch of a neo-traditional tattoo design with two hearts, roses and banners reading Family and Trust, shown without a body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hearts, roses and banners tattoo design

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a tattoo design showing two shaded hearts, open roses and leaves, with a ribbon banner reading Family across the upper heart and another banner reading Trust across the lower part. The linework is bold with soft graphite shading on the hearts and leaves, and loose swirling lines frame the top and bottom of the composition. The image is black and grey on a pale background and is centred with the motifs filling the frame.

Neo-trad Heart Rose Banner Leaf Family Ribbon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer, child, the fire won't wait on us and neither will the wind up at Harrow Gap. You want to hear how Ada Pryce went up the pass in the white month with her sister tied to her by forty yards of red wool? Then listen, because I only tell it once a winter.

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The carter's mules had gone over the lip of the gap before dusk, and their bells were still ringing somewhere beneath the snow. Their father had been that carter, and he was among the bells. Ada was twenty and Mair fifteen, with a cough that rattled like a loose shutter. Ada said they would wait for the thaw. Mair said the bells would not wait. So they went, with the lantern shuttered and the rope knotted at each waist, and their mother's old words stitched into the wool at every knot: Keep, and be kept.

The wind took the lantern in the third hour, and after that they went by the feel of the rope. Once Ada slipped and hung over nothing at all, and it was Mair, lighter but stubborn as a goat, who dug her heels into the ice and held. They found the carter in the lee of a boulder with his leg bent the wrong way. He said he had heard the bells too and thought the dead were calling him home for supper. Ada laughed until she wept. They carried him down between them, one on each side, the rope cut and tied again so that all three were joined.

In spring the roses came up through the scree where the mules had gone down, pale and open as cupped hands, and the carter's grandchildren still cut them to hang above the door. Folk say the pass is cursed. Maybe it is. But two girls once held on to each other harder than the mountain could pull them apart, and the roses have never forgotten it. Now the fire's low. Off to bed with you.