Tombstone reading Wish You Were Here

Traditional · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A traditional style tattoo of a headstone with the words WISH YOU WERE HERE carved across its face, set on a rough stone base. A small five-petal flower and a leaf sit at the bottom of the design, and a partial dagger and skull tattoo appears at the right edge of the frame. The linework is bold and even, with hatched shading on the stone and base, and the piece is entirely black and grey.

Traditional Thigh Tombstone Text Flower Leaf Dagger Skull

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The card had been printed in 1962 as a joke nobody in Porthcarrow found funny, and it sat face down at the bottom of Dilys Hocking's spinner rack for thirty years, under the lighthouse views. I found it the week the harbour wall came down in the storm, when the shop was full of wet sand and nobody wanted anything. The stone on the front was grey as a slate roof, with a flower tucked at its foot and a single leaf beside it, and the words ran across its face in capitals like a shop sign. WISH YOU WERE HERE. Dilys had written nothing on the back except a price in pencil, two pence, which was less than the stamp.

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My brother Gethin had taken the Thursday boat to Ilfracombe and not come back on the Saturday. Nobody had said he was dead. Nobody had said anything useful at all, only that the ferry company was sorry and the coastguard would keep looking until the light went. Mam wanted the spare room aired. Dilys, who had buried a husband and two cats, told me a postcard was the only honest thing a person could send from a town like ours, because it asked for nothing and said less.

So I borrowed her pen, wrote on the back, and walked the card up to the post box on the front. Harbour's still here. Lamp's still on. Come home when you're ready and I'll put the kettle on. I posted it without a stamp, because Dilys said the box would take it anyway if you meant it.

Gethin turned up on the Tuesday, cold and cross, having spent two nights in a fisherman's hut on the far side of the breakwater. The card was in his jacket, soft at the corners, with the Ilfracombe postmark over the old price. He said he had laughed for the first time since Thursday. I told him it wasn't a joke. He said that was exactly why it had worked.