Black line drawing flash design of two roses, a HONOR banner and a blade on cream paper, in a traditional style, with no body placement shown.

Two roses and HONOR banner line drawing

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A pen and ink drawing of a tattoo design on cream paper, showing two large roses stacked vertically with a ribbon banner across the middle reading HONOR. A blade-like object and a small heart sit among the petals, with a further lettered motif at the right edge. The linework is bold and outlined with hatched shading inside the petals and banner, and the design is in black ink only.

Traditional Rose Banner Heart Blade 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

Pull your stool closer, boy, the lamp is nearly dry and I'll not waste the oil on a lazy tongue. You want the story of the banner, is it? Then mind the knife on the table, because it was a knife that started the whole business.

Keep reading

Three weeks out from Bristol, the Marigold lost her foremast in a squall off the Azores. Old Tobias Venn, who had sailed with my father, took a hatchet to the broken spar with his teeth clenched and his blade hanging from his belt like a sermon nobody asked for. He cut the lines clean and saved the crew, and when we made Funchal the captain wanted him flogged for wasting good cordage. Tobias only laughed and showed him the two roses he had inked on his forearm the year before, one for his mother in Clifton and one for the Marigold herself, because she had carried him home twice already.

Under the roses went the ribbon, with HONOR written across it in letters a Norfolk sign-painter had sworn were the finest he ever made. Honour, Tobias said, was only a word until somebody put it on a ribbon and made you carry it about with you wherever you walked.

The captain never flogged him. He gave him the bell rope to mend instead, and every morning after that Tobias sewed the same tidy knot and whistled the same tune, and the watch learned to set their clocks by him. Mind the lamp now, boy, and fetch me the rum.