Traditional style flash design of a gold winged W flanked by two red roses and green leaves, with a yellow banner reading WARRIOR.

Winged W with roses and Warrior banner

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A traditional style flash drawing showing a gold winged W emblem with black outlines and shaded highlights. Two red roses with dark shadowing sit either side of the lower emblem, with green leaves spreading outward. A curled yellow banner across the bottom carries the word WARRIOR in black lettering on a cream background.

Traditional Rose Leaves Banner

Find an artist for this

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

The size had gone tacky in the rain, so Ray Dorning worked under the awning of the fish stall with his tin of gold leaf tucked inside his coat. Cattle Market was emptying. Traders dragged tarpaulins over crates of cabbages, and the gutters ran brown with the day's leftover water.

Keep reading

The sign was for the old gym on Pinfold Lane, where his brother Mick had trained lads who came in with nothing and left with a bit of backbone. Mick had died in March. The committee wanted the winged W repainted before the reopening, and they wanted someone who knew how the shading should fall, which meant Ray, who had stood beside Mick at the bench for thirty years and learnt the hatching from him without ever being told it was a lesson.

He laid the gold in long strokes, working the highlights in a darker ochre so the wings seemed to lift off the board. Then he built the roses, petal by petal, the way Mick had shown him on the lid of a biscuit tin. The banner came last. He lettered WARRIOR in black, with a tail on the R, and the rain softened the edges of the letters until he had to lean in close with his finest brush.

When the committee arrived with their umbrellas, they stood in the drizzle and read it. Nobody said anything for a while. Ray packed his tins and noticed the cream ground had gone the colour of weak tea where the water had pooled, and that the gold, where he had worked it thickest, had held.