Black script lettering on skin reading Roses are red, My name's Dave, This poem makes no sense, Microwave, placed on the upper back.

Rhyming poem lettering on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

Four lines of cursive script in black ink read Roses are red, My name's Dave, This poem makes no sense and Microwave, staggered across the skin. The linework is fine and even, with solid black letters and no shading. The text sits in the centre of the frame on a warm skin tone, with a small blurred pink object visible at the top edge.

Lettering Back Rose Text Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, the cake will keep, and so will I, for I've waited forty years to tell you how the verse came about. Uncle Ray was a man who wrote a card for every birthday in the parish and never once checked the rhyme. On the night of Maureen Pike's wedding he stood up with a glass of her father's sherry and recited the thing he'd been labouring over for a fortnight.

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Roses are red, he began, and the room went quiet, because roses were red, that much was true, and nobody cared to contradict a man holding a sherry glass. My name's Dave, he went on, which startled us all, for Ray had been Ray at his christening and Ray on his bus pass. This poem makes no sense, he announced, and that was the first honest thing he said all evening. Then he bowed to the bride, drew breath like a man about to dive, and bellowed, Microwave.

Nobody knew what a microwave had to do with love. Maureen's mother said afterwards it was a Yorkshire blessing. Her new husband said it was the sherry. Maureen laughed so hard she sprayed the top tier of the cake, and Ray, very pleased with himself, sat down and asked for a second glass.

He had the four lines written on a tea towel the following Christmas, and the towel hung on the oven door for thirty years. Every festive dinner someone in that family still says Microwave under their breath, and Maureen, a grandmother now, still goes pink.