Traditional style colour tattoo of a tattoo machine framed by red roses and green leaves, with a banner reading CRAFT DIVA, on a section of skin.

Tattoo machine with roses and banner

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

A tattoo machine sits at the centre, with two red roses above and below it, outlined in bold black linework and filled with solid red, green and blue. A scroll banner runs down the right side of the machine with the words CRAFT DIVA in black lettering. The image is a close, slightly angled shot against plain pale skin, with the design filling most of the frame.

Traditional Other Tattoo machine Rose Banner Leaves Lettering

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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

Sit yourself by the range and leave the kettle alone, it's older than your mother. I'll tell you about the year a travelling man left his tattooing machine in Nell Harrow's back kitchen and forgot to come back for it.

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Gideon Pask came through Saltcote every August with a tent that smelled of paraffin and a box lined in green baize. Nobody in town would sit for him but the bargemen. Nell watched from the picture house, where she mended the projector lamps, as he pressed his thumb on the outlines to keep the ink where he wanted it. When a fever put him in the infirmary at Dunmere, he left the box with her, wrapped in a tea towel, and one order: keep the damp out of its works.

So she did. She learned the way you learn anything you're not supposed to, with the blind down. Oranges first, then the back of her own hand, then the baker's lad, who swore on his mother he'd tell nobody. Her roses came out fat and sure. Old Ostle, the sign painter, lettered a scroll for her window as a joke, CRAFT DIVA in gold leaf, and the name stuck to her like sugar to a thumb. The vicar's wife crossed the road rather than walk past it.

Pask came back the following spring, thin as a rake, hat in his hands. She had the machine humming on the bench and a fishwife's daughter in the chair. He looked at the scroll, then the roses, then her steady hand. 'You kept the damp out,' he said, and that was all the blessing he ever gave. He never asked for the box. A machine is only a tin of noise, he told her on his way out, until somebody needs it to say something. Mind the kettle.