Traditional style flash design of a woman with a voluminous dark beehive hairstyle, red roses and a ribbon banner reading LOVE IS A LOSING GAME.

Traditional portrait with roses and banner

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A painted flash design of a woman in profile-leaning three-quarter view, with a tall dark beehive hairstyle, a small heart on her shoulder and a mole on her cheek. Two red roses with white highlights sit in her hair and at the lower left, framed by an oval with a sage green background and a brown laurel wreath. Bold black outlines, smooth shading and warm skin tones give it a classic traditional look, and a brown ribbon banner across the bottom carries the lettering.

Traditional Woman Portrait Rose Banner Lettering Heart Laurel Oval frame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gulls had given up on the fish by the time Nan Hollis came down the quay with her roses in a tin bucket. She sold them from a barrow outside the Anchor, and in Porthkerran it was said she could read a sailor's luck from the way he bought his flowers. Her black hair rose in a tall, glossy heap that the sea wind never managed to flatten, and each morning she pinned a red rose into it, the same as her mother had before her.

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Tobias Crane, who mended nets with bleeding thumbs and had never once lost at dice, made a wager in the bar one wet Friday. He would have her walk out with him by Michaelmas, he said, and he would stake the Mary Ellen against it. The landlord wrote the terms on a strip of brown ribbon and nailed it above the hearth. Nan heard of it and laughed at the barrow. "Love is a losing game, Tobias Crane," she told him, "and the sea always collects."

He courted her anyway. He brought her sprigs of laurel from the cliff path and mended her gate without being asked. Michaelmas came in on a gale, and the Mary Ellen was still out past the bar when the lamps were lit. Nan stood on the harbour wall all night with a rose in her hair. At dawn she saw the boat come in low through the grey water, with Tobias at the tiller, soaked and grinning like a fool.

He came up the quay to claim his prize. Nan took the ribbon down from the Anchor's hearth, cut it through the middle, and tied one half to his wrist. The other half she dropped into the harbour with a single red rose, and the tide carried them both out past the bar. The sea had collected nothing, and for once she did not mind.