Black line drawing of a laurel wreath encircling a stylised number four, shown as a tattoo flash design with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Laurel wreath around a number four

Black and grey · Flash

The design shows a stylised number four, with a bold outlined numeral and a crossbar, enclosed by a wreath of leaves that curves up the left and right sides and meets at the base. The linework is uniform black outline on white, with no shading or fill. The composition is centred and symmetrical, with the leaves overlapping the numeral's base.

Laurel Wreath Leaves Numeral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Fourth, the adjudicator said, and the hall made the sound a crowd makes when it has been told what to feel. You clap because everyone claps. Gerald Pryce, who plays bass trombone and has a chest like a bellows with a hole in it, pats your shoulder twice and says fourth is the best of the losers. The shield goes to Hollin Colliery Silver. The wreath is handed to you anyway.

Keep reading

It is laurel, cut from the chapel hedge on Chapel Row and bent round a wire frame by the secretary's wife, who has done one for every band in the valley since 1971. The number is cut from card, painted white and glued over the crossbar with something that smells like a cobbler's shop. The committee cannot run to gold, so the leaves are only green, and somebody has tied it with purple ribbon that has already frayed where a thumb has tugged it. You carry it out under your arm like a loaf.

Up the hill the wheel over the drift is turning, slow and black against the last of the light. A boy on a bike with no brakes pulls alongside and asks what you won. Fourth, you say. He asks what fourth gets. A wreath, you tell him, and he looks at it the way boys look at things not worth the bother, and rides off ringing his bell at nobody.

At home you hang it on the back of the scullery door, beside the brass lamp check your father wore on his cap for thirty-one years. His was number four too. The check told the board in the lamp room which men were below, and each time he came up he hung it back on its hook with a tap. You stand there with your coat still on and tap the card once with your knuckle, just to hear it.