Black linework laurel wreath with the words Courage, dear heart in script across the centre, tattooed on an arm.

Laurel wreath with Courage, dear heart script

Botanical · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A laurel wreath of crossed, leaf-covered stems frames the handwritten words Courage, dear heart. The leaves are outlined in fine black linework, with some shaded in hatched strokes for depth. The design is centred on pale skin with a plain, softly lit background.

Botanical Lettering Other Laurel Wreath Leaves Script

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The laurel came off the bush behind the chapel wall, the one the gulls never managed to strip bare, and Mam made me cut it with the good scissors before the boat went out. My brother Tom had been put forward for the parish swim, a race from Crane Rock to the slipway that nobody from the island had won since the war. Mam said a crown was owed to whoever came through the cold water first. I thought it was foolishness, and I said so, and she gave me the look that meant I would be sorry later.

Keep reading

Tom went off the rock with the whole parish shouting from the quay, and by the halfway buoy he had stopped, treading water, his face gone the colour of the sky. I did not wait for anyone's instruction. I went down the slipway in my boots and waded until the cold reached my knees, and I called across the water the only thing I could think of, the words Granddad used to say when the lamp failed in a gale: Courage, dear heart. Tom turned his head towards me. Then he came in.

The committee gave him the cup, which was a tin thing with a dent in its lid. The crown went to me, because Mrs Pender said a shout that brings a man home deserves more than a boy's medal. I wore it to the shop and back, and by the next morning it had wilted on the windowsill.

Mam pressed the leaves between the pages of the big Bible that night. In the morning I found them flat and brown as lace, and the words I had shouted were still there in pencil on the back of the tide table, where I had copied them down so I would not forget.