Traditional style flash design of a red rose, pale blue snowflake and yellow flame above a ribbon banner reading KEEP MOVING FORWARD, with no body placement shown.

Rose, snowflake and ribbon quote design

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

The design shows a red rose with white highlights at the top, a pale blue snowflake or ice crystal in the middle, and a black and grey emblem with a yellow flame-like shape at the bottom. A white ribbon banner wraps down through the image, reading KEEP MOVING FORWARD with the attribution MONTY OUM beneath. The bold outlines and flat fills are set on a plain white background in a vertical composition.

Traditional Rose Snowflake Flame Quote Text

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Come closer, the fire has another hour in it, and you'll want the rest before the cold comes down off the ridge. My grandmother used to say a road remembers who walked it, and this one remembers a woman called Imke Varro, who drove a salt truck across the Pale Flats with a red rose painted on her door and a crate of ice-glass in the back, because the cities paid well for it to cool their bells.

Keep reading

Her mother had told her the flats were a sea that forgot how to be wet. Every night the wind swept over the salt and the moon rose like a white coin, and every morning she drove east toward a town that had burned down twice. The rose on the door had been her brother's idea. He had died in a rockfall the spring before, and she painted the petals red where his blood should have been, though she never said that aloud, only drew it.

On the forty-third night the engine coughed and quit under a sky thick with stars. She sat in the cab with the door open, watching frost gather on the inside of the windscreen in the shape of little crystals, and she thought seriously about lying down in the salt. Then a light came bobbing out of the dark, a lantern carried by a boy she had never seen, who said only, "Road's that way. Keep moving forward," and walked on before she could thank him.

She followed the lantern all night. By dawn the salt had turned to red dust under her boots and the truck was a speck behind her. Nobody in the east town ever found the boy, but they found her at the well at noon, still walking, still saying the words to herself so she wouldn't stop.