Black line tattoo of a laurel wreath enclosing the script words Courage, dear heart on a lower leg, in a botanical and lettering style.

Laurel wreath with Courage, dear heart

Botanical · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A laurel wreath of leaves, drawn in black outline with hatched shading on some leaves, curves around a line of cursive script reading Courage, dear heart. The wreath's stems cross at the bottom and the leaves are evenly spaced, giving a symmetrical composition. The work is entirely black and grey ink on pale skin, photographed straight on against a blurred background.

Botanical Lettering Calf Laurel wreath Leaves Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit down, the pair of you, and mind the kettle, because this is the story of Mrs Ada Pring and the laurel hedge behind the Co-op in Market Lessing, and nobody in that town will tell it the same way twice.

Keep reading

Ada had a hedge of bay laurel that grew higher than the chapel roof, and every spring she clipped it with a pair of shears her husband had ground himself. The summer the Ellery boy went up the county for the schools mile, she cut a wreath from the trimmings, bent the stems round a cotton reel, and sent it up on the bus with him. He came third. Nobody thought much of that except Ada, who had been sure of first.

When the telegram came about the Ellery boy in the autumn, it was not from the county. It was from the Ministry, and it said he was missing somewhere past a river none of us could spell. Ada went out to the hedge in her apron and cut the whole side of it down to the wall. She didn't say a word to anyone. The wreath she made that week she pinned to the chapel door with a card, and on the card she wrote in her good hand the three words her mother had said over her own bad fever: Courage, dear heart.

The boy came home in the new year, thin as a lath and with a limp he never lost. He walked past the chapel, saw the wreath gone brown at the edges, and stood there a long while. Then he went round to the back and began, very carefully, to plant new cuttings in the gap where the hedge had been.