Ornate Mom lettering with a rose

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A pen drawing of a tattoo design in which large ornate Mom lettering with swirling flourishes sits behind a shaded rose with hatched leaves. Smaller script reads Happy Birthday above and Always by my side below, all in fine black linework on a white background. A hand holding a pen is visible at the right edge of the frame.

Lettering Traditional Mom Rose Lettering Leaves Flourish Script

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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

Sit closer, you lot, and mind the cold coming off the trees. My gran used to say the wood at the top of Harrow Lane was older than the village and twice as stubborn, and she was right, because it still hasn't let go of the stile where Ada Fenn left her pen.

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Ada was a letter-cutter's girl, which meant she could make any word stand up and bow. Wood, stone, the brass plates on the church door. Every word she made had to be read by someone, she said, or it was only a scribble. So when the gamekeeper's boy went off to the far coast and never sent word, Ada spent a whole winter inking one word onto the gate post as fine as a hair: MOM. Round it she set swirling tails like smoke off a chimney, and in the middle she drew a rose, its leaves hatched so close you could almost smell the rain on them.

Then she wrote the small words underneath, the ones folk actually say. Happy birthday, up top, and lower down, always by my side. The rain came and went. The gate stayed put. The boy came home the next spring with a sea-burn on his neck, read the post twice over, and stood there so long his mother came out with the kettle and went back in again without a word.

That's the whole of it. Mind the stile on your way out. There's still ink on its lip where Ada's hand rested, and the wood never did wash it off.