KEY BISCAYNE, Fla. — As Justin Sands watched his wife, the tennis player Bethanie Mattek-Sands, fight through months of an exhausting rehabilitation for a right knee injury, he pondered different ways to honor her fierce determination.

His best idea was to get a tattoo depicting an imaginary scar of his own, drawn along his own knee with a tuft of green grass representing the playing surface at Wimbledon where Mattek-Sands was injured last July, and the date of her gruesome fall written under it.

He had it all planned, but events overtook him and the ink stayed in the tube.

On Jan. 7, Sands, a former college football player, was hunting elk in a remote area of northeastern Arizona and came to a small incline. As he walked down the hill he thought to himself that his wife, who was gaining strength in her knee, would probably be able to handle the modest slope. Then, wham.