Traditional coloured forearm tattoo of a pink rose, pansies and forget-me-nots, with a banner reading Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.

Rose and pansy banner on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A pink rose, two purple pansies and several blue forget-me-not flowers sit among green leaves, with three scrolling banners carrying the Latin text Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. The outlines are bold and the petals and leaves are shaded with soft gradients of pink, purple and green. The tattoo wraps across the forearm and fills most of the frame against a dark background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The council man had been tapping his pen against the counter for ten minutes when Hilda Crane finally put down the sweet pea seed and asked him to say the figure again, slowly, so she could write it in the ledger beside her late husband's careful hand. Mr Strickland repeated it. It was a fair sum for a shop with a sloping floor and a bell that stuck, and it would buy a car park with forty spaces and a view of the bus station.

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She did not write it down. Ernest had kept the business going for thirty years on pansies and patience, and the back yard still bloomed with the heartsease he had bred from a packet bought off a Scotsman in 1934. Beside the pansies grew a pink rose that had refused to die through two winters, and along the beck the forget-me-nots came back every spring whether anyone asked them to or not. Hilda had once painted a sign for the window to keep the pigeons off the bulbs, using the Latin Ernest had learned from a master at the grammar school who swore the words had been sent down to him from the Oxford men. Nolite te bastardes carborundorum, it read, in three curling strips of card, and it had hung there since the war.

"What does it mean, Mrs Crane?" he asked, squinting at it through the glass.

"Don't let the bastards grind you down," she said. "Ernest's Latin master was very particular about the grammar."

Mr Strickland laughed, then stopped when he saw she had not. He took his pen and his figure and his folder and left without the sweet peas he had come in for. Hilda counted the till, watered the pansies in their trays, and that afternoon she dug a row of forget-me-nots into the strip of earth along the kerb, where the tarmac men would have to dig around them.

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