Traditional style tattoo of a black umbrella with red roses and grey shading above a banner reading Come What May, on the upper arm.

Umbrella and roses with Come What May banner

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A black umbrella with a grey, scalloped canopy and gold trim sits above a grey banner that reads COME WHAT MAY. Two red roses with green leaves decorate the top of the umbrella, and small grey raindrops fall beside the banner. The linework is bold and the shading is smooth grey, with the red and gold used as accents against the dark umbrella.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Dorothy Pask had mended umbrellas on the pier at Morecambe for thirty-one years, and in all that time nobody had ever asked her to mend one with a motto. The man who brought it in that wet Tuesday was a stranger, soaked to the collar, holding the frame out in front of him like a dead bird. Scalloped canopy, gold trim gone green at the seams, and two roses someone had painted on the panels with more love than skill. "Something's written on it," he said. "Can you make it stay?"

Keep reading

She turned the stretcher in her hands and found the words worked into the silk along the rib: come what may. Her mother had said that over the kitchen sink every morning of the war, usually while burning the toast. Dorothy threaded her needle with black cotton and restitched the letters one stitch at a time, while the rain came sideways off the Irish Sea and rattled the shutters.

He watched her hands. "My father bought it in 1952," he said. "He didn't own a single other thing that wasn't second-hand."

She tied off the last knot and held the umbrella up to the lamp. The roses were fresh, but the words had held. "Then he knew what he was about," she said, and charged him sixpence, which was all the shop had ever charged for kindness.

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