Pencil drawing of two shaded roses, a bow, a hanging cross and a script banner reading La Familia, shown as a tattoo design without a body placement.

Two roses, ribbon banner and cross design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A greyscale pencil drawing of two open roses with a ribbon banner carrying the script words La Familia across the top. A bow sits below the roses with a cross pendant hanging from a loop of cord. The roses and bow are drawn with soft graded shading and the lettering has flowing, looped strokes.

Lettering Botanical Realism Rose Ribbon Bow Cross Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down by the range, you're letting the cold in and I've no coal to spare for the street. Right. You want the story of the Vidal sisters, and I'll tell it once, straight through, because my knees won't stand a second go.

Keep reading

Their father had the sign-writing business on Chapel Row, and the one thing he would never paint for money was a ribbon. He said a ribbon was a promise and you didn't sell promises by the yard. So when the eldest, Inés, married a lad off the Bristol boats in 1953, she asked him for a ribbon across the shop window, and he refused her. Two days later he came round with a tin of gold leaf and a brush so fine it could thread a needle. He wrote La Familia in curls that went on and on, with roses either side, painted so the petals looked ready to drop off the glass.

Then the trouble came, the way it does. Inés's husband went back to sea and never came home, and the sisters fell out over who should keep the shop. Nobody spoke for a year. The satin bow in the middle of the window was what they argued over most. Their mother had tied it on her wedding bouquet, and now it hung gathering dust behind the glass.

It was the youngest, Carmen, who climbed the ladder one Sunday with their mother's rosary chain, hung the cross from the loop of the bow the way you'd hang a bell, and climbed down without a word. Inés said nothing either. But the next morning the two of them were scrubbing that glass together, and the cross swung every time the door opened.

That's all there is, love. The shop's a dentist's now. The cross is still hanging from that bow under the paint, if you know where to look.