Black ink flash design of the words love her but leave her wild in script lettering inside a circular wreath of hatched leaves, with no body placement shown.

Love her but leave her wild lettering in a leaf wreath

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The design shows the phrase love her but leave her wild in flowing hand-lettered script, with a small line reading Atticus Finch beneath the final word. The words sit inside a circular wreath of hatched, leaf-shaped foliage drawn in fine black lines, with scattered dot speckles around the edge. It is a black ink drawing on a plain white background with no colour.

Lettering Botanical Quote Lettering Wreath Leaves Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been coming off the awning all morning, and I was pinning a wreath of bay and ivy when the sign-writer from the next stall ducked under my umbrella with a cardboard tube under his arm. He said a bride had asked him to letter something for her wedding, and the loops would not sit right.

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He unrolled it across my trestle table and weighted the corners with a tin of cloves and a jar of pine cones. Black ink, a ring of leaves hatched so finely you could lose a fingernail in the lines. The words curled through the middle like a current: love her, but leave her wild. Someone had tucked a name under the last word, small and neat. "Who's Atticus Finch?" I asked. He laughed and said a lawyer in an old novel, and that the bride's father had insisted it sounded wise.

I told him the leaves were the honest part. Bay never grows in a straight line. It just keeps reaching for whatever light is left. I had spent twenty years clipping a hedge my husband wanted square, and the hedge refused. Every March it sent long shoots over the path, and every March I left them, and every March he grumbled, and every June the blackbirds nested in them.

He rolled his drawing up and asked if I would make a wreath for the bride's mother on Saturday. I said I would make one that would not keep its shape. He frowned as if I had misquoted him, and the rain drummed on while I wired the stems loose, and the ivy crept over the edge of the table as though it had been waiting all along.