Colour tattoo on the upper thigh showing orange daisies, a pencil with eraser, a blue awareness ribbon and the word Survivor in script.

Survivor script, daisies and awareness ribbon on thigh

Lettering · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo on the upper thigh combines two orange daisies, a pencil with a red eraser and a blue awareness ribbon labelled PTSD, with the word Survivor in a blue-grey script across the centre. Above the script sits a faded word in dark lettering that is partly obscured. The linework is bold and outlined, with soft shading in the flowers and ribbon, and the design is arranged in a loose cluster on bare skin.

Lettering Botanical Thigh Daisy Flower Pencil Ribbon Awareness ribbon Script Lettering

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

The proofs came back from the printer with a wet ring on the corner of page nine, and Margery Pell sat over them with her pencil until the lamp needed trimming. Someone at the press had written VICTIM in the margin beside her daisies, in a hand she didn't know, and asked whether it was meant to be the caption. It wasn't. She had drawn the word herself on the first sketch, light as breath, to be rubbed out before the engraver saw it, and she had forgotten to rub it out.

Keep reading

She took the eraser down from its tin. The rubber was a stub now, red at one end and cracked along one side, bought from the stationer on Market Street in the year her husband still drove the milk float. She worked the corner gently. Graphite smeared into the grain of the paper and came up grey, then paler, and under it the letters thinned until only a ghost of the strokes remained, like tyre marks on wet sand.

By the time the kettle boiled she had the page clean enough to pass. She drew the daisies again, a little fuller, their petals lifted by a dab of ochre from the tin on the sill. Then she wrote a single word beneath them in a small, careful italic, and left it there for the engraver to find.

The next morning the boy from the press came for the proofs and stood on her step with his cap in his hands. He read the caption twice. Then he smiled, as if somebody had finally told him the right answer to a question he hadn't known how to ask.