Pencil line drawing of a traditional-style tattoo design with roses, two lovebirds in an ornate heart frame and a banner reading Hopeless Romantic.

Roses and lovebirds tattoo design

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil and ink line drawing on cream paper shows a symmetrical tattoo design of roses on either side of an ornate, scrolled heart-shaped frame. Two small birds sit together in the centre, and a banner above the frame reads Hopeless Romantic. The linework is clean and black with no shading, and the design is shown as a flat sheet beside pens and a small photograph of a pink rose.

Traditional Rose Bird Heart Banner Ornate frame Lettering Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow closed the Hollin Pass on the Tuesday, and by Thursday there were four of us at the Crook and Lantern: a commercial traveller in lace gloves, two lorry drivers playing cards for matchsticks, and Edwin Vale, who had walked in from the bus stop with a leather roll under one arm and the look of a man apologising to the weather.

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He asked for the back room with the window onto the rose bed, which was nothing now but black stalks under white. He spent his evenings at the corner table with a sharpened pencil and a sheet of tracing paper, drawing the same heart again and again, scrolls curling off it as if someone had combed them. I asked what it was for. He said it was a promise he hadn't yet decided how to keep.

On the third night the power failed and we sat close to the range with one oil lamp. He told me about his sister's wedding, and the pair of small birds she had asked him to paint on the cake stand, and how he had drawn them from memory afterwards because he couldn't bear to see them go to the bin. Then he took the chalk from the bar, wrote HOPELESS ROMANTIC across the slate in capitals, and said it was the diagnosis his doctor would have given him, if doctors gave such things. I laughed. He didn't.

The plough reached us by noon on Saturday. He left his drawing pinned to the wall beside the stairs: two birds in the centre of the frame, beaks almost touching, and underneath in his careful hand, For the woman who kept the fire in. He never came back that winter. I still have the slate behind the bar, and I have never wiped it clean.