Traditional style tattoo on an upper arm showing red roses, a grey envelope with a red wax seal, forget-me-not flowers and a banner with lettering.

Roses and envelope with banner on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A sealed envelope sits at the centre of the design, with two red roses above and below it and small blue forget-me-not flowers filling the gaps. Two curled banners carry lettering across the envelope, and a loose ring outline sits at the lower edge. Bold black outlines and grey shading give the envelope depth, while the roses and flowers use red and blue ink.

Traditional Upper arm Rose Envelope Banner Lettering Forget-me-not Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Ashby had sorted the Hollins Lane post for thirty-one years, and she could tell a bad-news envelope by its weight before she read the postmark. This one came out from the back of the sorting frame on a wet Tuesday, wedged behind a drawer that had jammed in 1974. It was cream paper, the flap sealed with a red wax blob pressed with a rose. It was addressed to Mrs Dorothy Fenwick, who had been dead since March.

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She carried it up the hill herself, past the chapel and the allotments where forget-me-nots had gone to seed along the fence. Colin Fenwick answered the door in his slippers, turned the envelope over twice, and said his mother never wrote to anyone. She only wrote on the backs of seed packets, on the margins of the Radio Times, and once on the lid of a biscuit tin.

They opened it at the kitchen table with a butter knife. Inside was one sheet folded in three. Across the top, in Dorothy's looping hand, were the words: Don't let the grey buggers get you down, love. Underneath came a list. Bread. Stamps. Ring the man about the gutter. The date at the bottom was a Tuesday in October 1974.

Colin laughed until he had to sit down. Nell didn't laugh. She thought of Dorothy at the counter that autumn, buying a book of first-class stamps, and of the drawer that had swallowed her letter whole. So Nell took the envelope back down the hill with her, pressed a fresh stamp on the corner, and posted it again, addressed to Colin, so that the thing could finally arrive.