Colour traditional tattoo on a calf of a rose over crossed baseball bats, with barbed wire above and the words Life's Swinging Hard and But I'm Swinging Harder.

Rose and crossed bats with barbed wire

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

A bold traditional design shows a red rose with green leaves in front of two crossed baseball bats, with a barbed wire wreath above and asterisk-style stars. Two lines of lettering curve around the top and bottom of the design. Thick black outlines define the shapes, and the colour is filled with red, green, orange and brown on a plain background of brick wall.

Traditional Calf Rose Leaves Star Lettering Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tam Greave came up the lane every morning with two ash bats over his shoulder, because the fence wire along Mother Ashdown's orchard had been strung loose by the wind again and the sheep kept going through it. Nobody asked him to mend it. He said a man who could not hit a ball could at least hit a problem, and the village laughed, and then they stopped laughing when the barn roof came off in March and he was the first one up the ladder.

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His father had always said life swings hard, and the old men at the inn said it too, usually with a pint in one hand. Tam said that was fair enough, but he had never once seen life pick up a bat. So when the frost split the apple wood and the barbed wire curled up off the posts like something alive, he took the bats down to the hedge and swung them, one at the rust and one at the cold, until his palms ached around the handles.

Mother Ashdown watched from her window with a cup of tea going cold. She had planted a single rose by the gate the year her husband died, and in thirty years it had never bloomed. That spring, while Tam worked in the frost-bitten field, it put out one red flower with an orange heart. She carried a cutting of it down the lane to him in a jam jar.

He stood the jar on a fence post, looked at the wire and the rose and the two bats leaning together, and laughed for the first time since winter. The wind kept blowing, as it always would. But the bloom stayed put, and for once the wire had something to hold.