Pencil drawing of a revolver with a spade on the grip, surrounded by three roses and leaves with vines, shown in black and grey as a tattoo design.

Revolver with roses and ace of spades

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a revolver pistol with a spade symbol on its pale grip, framed by three shaded roses, leaves and curling vines. The linework is firm and outlined, with soft graphite shading on the barrel, cylinder and petals. The image is black and grey on a plain white background, with the design centred and filling the frame.

Neo-trad Revolver Gun Rose Spade Leaves Vine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Corrigan came in on a wet Thursday with a shoebox under his arm and set it on my counter as if it might go off. Inside, wrapped in last week's Racing Post, lay a revolver so old the bluing had worn to pewter along the barrel. Someone had kept the pale grip buffed for decades, and a black spade sat in the middle of it like a full stop. Round the frame, fat roses had been drawn in pencil, their leaves cut sharp as tin.

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"Eight pounds," he said. "That's all it's worth to me."

I told him a firearm couldn't cross my counter without a licence and a sergeant's signature, and he laughed the way men laugh when they have already decided. His father had dealt cards at a hotel in Wakefield through the thirties, he said, and kept this in an inside pocket for the nights the tables turned. The spade was the only ace the old man ever played that paid out. The roses were for his mother, who grew them up the yard wall and never once let him prune them.

I took his details, gave him a ticket, and locked the revolver in the back safe with the wedding rings and the dead men's watches. Then I went round the shop with a cloth, out of habit, the way I did after anyone's grief came through the door. Three weeks later the ticket came back unclaimed, and the number he had given me was disconnected. Nobody ever came for the gun.

I still keep a copy of that ticket pinned above the till. Now and then a customer asks what the cards are for, and I tell them about a man who wanted eight pounds for a memory. Some afternoons, when the light comes low through the window, I can still see the ace in the grip, the wax never quite rubbed off it.