Traditional style flash design of a hand holding a quill over a scroll reading Dear John, with a red rose, black feathers and a heart envelope.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Quill, scroll and rose flash design

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A drawn tattoo design showing a hand holding a black quill over an unrolled scroll with the words Dear John, beside a red rose with black leaves and an open envelope sealed with a red heart. The bold black outlines and flat fills are typical of traditional American tattoo flash, with red and cream shading and small red swooshes around the edges. The palette uses red, teal, black and cream on a beige background.

Traditional Rose Quill Feather Hand Scroll Envelope Heart Letter Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs. Agnes Pollard had kept the good paper for twenty years, the cream stock with the watermark of a crowned wren, and she was not going to waste a sheet on a man who had left the kettle to go cold. So when the envelope came back to the post office in Harrowgate with JOHN scrawled across it in a hand she didn't recognise, she took out her silver-nibbed pen and began again.

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Dear John, she wrote, and then stopped, because the scroll of her thoughts had unrolled further than the greeting allowed. The rose on the windowsill had dropped two petals since Tuesday. The teal ink she'd bought for the ledger had run dry, so the wren's crown was now simply black. Her sister Maud had come round with a pie and a verdict: you have written to him, haven't you, and you're going to make a pig's ear of it.

She sealed the letter with red wax and pressed a heart into it with the back of a thimble, which Maud said was sentimental and which Agnes thought was the only honest thing she had done all month. The envelope went on the mat by the door. In the morning there were two sets of footprints on the step, one of them his, and a bunch of red roses wrapped in brown paper with no card.

She read the letter one more time, found it had not improved, and decided she would forgive him for the roses instead.