Small coloured tattoo of a basketball wearing a jewelled crown with a wing on one side, placed on a person's shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Basketball with crown and wings on shoulder

Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

A small tattoo of a basketball with a jewelled crown sitting on top and a feathered wing extending to the right. The ball has brown and orange tones with dark seam lines and soft grey shading, while the crown has green gems and a small star above it. The photo is a close crop of bare skin on the shoulder, with the tattoo centred and the background softly out of focus.

Shoulder Crown Wing Gem Star

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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 rain had been coming sideways off the Gorse Lane awning since eight, and nobody wanted a second-hand anything. Then Tomasz came jogging through the puddles with a cardboard box of old leather basketballs from a school that was closing its gym. One ball had gone the colour of strong tea. Someone had glued a tin crown onto the top of it, its little stones the green of bottle glass, and taped a pale feather to each side. I was going to bin it.

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Nell, from the bus shelter across the road, saw it before I did and crossed through the traffic without looking. She was about nine and dripping. She offered fifty pence and told me, very seriously, that it had been Queen of the Ashdown Estate court since before either of us was born, and that it must never be sold to anyone who couldn't dribble. I said I'd take my chances. She bounced it once on the wet pavement and it came up in a clean arc, the crown catching the streetlight, the feathers clattering like someone shaking out a wet umbrella. She caught it, grinned, and was gone under the shelter's dripping roof before I'd found the change.

The rain stopped at four. I tried a bounce myself out of pure stupidity, and the ball leapt higher than the awning, hung there a moment too long, and came down into my hands warm as bread. One of the green stones had come loose. I put it in the till drawer and forgot about it until closing, when I found the ball sitting on the step outside, crown tilted a little to the left, as if it had been waiting for a challenger.