"I'm not much for the bible, either," Lauren agreed. She watched him thinking, brainstorming a few ideas herself. She'd listed the flowers just in case, but she hadn't really thought he'd go for them. Most men didn't, save the few who were war vets and went the poppies route. She pulled out her box of colored pencils and sketched quickly, a skill she'd perfected over the years. It was rough, of course; she'd need a little time to draw out a clean copy to make the transfer with, but there was no point in doing all that until he approved the final design. All the same, it was easy to see what the finished product might look like.
It was a deliberately ambiguous design, leaving the viewer to draw their own conclusions - two wings stretched out to either side of the center of the page, lushly feathered and flared wide, but it wasn't immediately clear if the view was of one bird full-on or two birds in profile, heads bowed. The negative space between them formed the loose suggestion of a heart without being obvious. She'd done the wings in black and white, finely shaded, but the tips of the wings were colored in pale washes of red, orange, and yellow, ringing the design in the suggestion of flame. It made the stylized birds that could've been doves into phoenixes, or perhaps was merely solemn tribute to the event he was memorializing.
Lauren flipped the pad around so he could see it. "What about something like that?" she asked, avoiding explaining any of the elements until he'd had a chance to take it in and make his own conclusions. "We can do something in the center," she said, "like a sprig of the rosemary--" She sketched one of the herb's long, slender sprigs with its spiky leaves in the top corner of her pad. "--Or put in the date, if you want it." She ripped off another corner of the paper, sketching out the current date in graceful but legible script and set it in the center of the design so he could see how it might look. "And don't worry about hurting my feelings if you hate it," she added with a grin. "I promise, you probably couldn't insult me if you tried. And it's way better for you to nitpick now than to end up with something you're not completely, 100% happy with when it's done. Because I will be insulted if you go to another artist to get it altered." She smiled again, mostly joking. Mostly.