Fine line tattoo of the words Stay Strong in black script above a small pink and purple botanical wreath on the inner upper arm.

Stay Strong script and floral wreath on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A close photograph of a fine line tattoo on the inner upper arm, showing the words Stay Strong in thin black cursive lettering. Beneath the lettering, a curved garland of small pink and lilac flowers with blue buds and green leaves is shaded softly in colour. The plain grey background and soft natural light keep the focus on the tattoo.

Fine line Botanical Lettering Upper arm Stay strong Script Flower Wreath Leaves Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody thanked me for the posy I pinned above the lamp hooks. The lads came up the stairs grey to the eyes, took their brass checks from me without a word, and then they would stop, look at the little wreath of pinks and lilacs on the card, and something in their faces would ease for a moment before they went out into the yard.

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I painted it the winter Ruth Ashby's husband didn't come up from the Low Main seam. She came in to collect his tin and sat on the bench with her hands in her lap, and I had nothing to say to her. So I took a stub of pencil and a sheet of the cardboard we used for shift tallies and drew what my mother grew by the back wall: campion, forget-me-nots, a few pink stock. Under them I wrote the only words I could think of that people say when there is nothing else, and I joined the letters up slantwise the way Miss Pryce taught us at the chapel school.

Ruth read it twice and asked if she could keep it. I gave her the one I'd made and made another for the board. By spring there were eleven cards along that wall, each with a different garland, the flowers never quite the same colour twice because I ran short of the red and used the pink from my sister's old hair ribbon.

The pit shut in the eighties, and the lamp room went to a scrapyard in Wigan. The card is still pinned where the board used to be, its paper gone the colour of stewed tea, and the lilac has held better than anyone expected.