Black ink line drawing of a pizza slice with dripping cheese, a striped handled tool and two banners reading Love dies and Pizza is forever, shown as a tattoo design on white paper.

Pizza slice with banners reading Love dies and Pizza is

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn black ink design of a pizza slice with stippled pepperoni and dripping cheese, with a striped handled tool and a decorative bow below it. Two ribbon banners with lettering read Love dies at upper left and Pizza is forever at lower right. The drawing uses clean outlines, dotwork shading and a plain white background.

Traditional Lettering Pizza Pizza slice Banner Lettering Cheese Drip Pepperoni Bow Love Forever

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fourth row of the week started over the oven timer, and by closing Maureen Pike had stopped pretending to wipe the counter. She reached under the till for the pizza wheel, its red and white barber-pole handle worn pale where three generations of thumbs had pressed it, and laid it beside Dev's hand without looking at him. "Your gran bought that from a catalogue in 1971," she said. "Cut the slices like you mean it."

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Dev took it home in a carrier bag with a tin of plum tomatoes and a bag of flour. For a fortnight he cut every slice in the flat with a cold, careful precision that made his flatmate Priya ask whether he'd broken up with someone. He hadn't. He had simply found that the wheel made a clean line through anything, dough, cheese, a cardboard box, a bad week, and that the cheese always ran down the side of the board in long, stubborn drips.

On the Sunday he took the wheel back to Tonino's, where Maureen was arguing with the delivery man about a dented tin. He cut a slice for her and then one for himself, the pepperoni stippled like sand under the strip light, and watched the grease pool along the crust. Maureen chewed for a long time and said nothing, which in her case was a verdict.

"Love dies," she said at last, licking her thumb. "Pizza's forever, love. Mind the drips." Then she took the wheel off him, wiped the handle on her apron, and went back to the row over the timer, which, Dev noticed, she had quietly lost.