Black blackletter capital D design with a castle silhouette and four-point stars inside the letter, shown as a drawn tattoo design without a body placement.

Blackletter D with a castle

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A bold black blackletter capital D forms the frame of this design. Inside the letter, a solid black castle silhouette with turrets and an arched doorway sits beside a cluster of four-point stars. The image uses flat black fills on a white background with no shading or grey tones.

Lettering Castle Star Blackletter

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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

Sit nearer the lamp, and mind the tent pegs, because the ground still remembers the old ring. I'll tell you how the Dunmore Travelling Marvel lost its elephant and kept its castle, though the men who drink in the Crown will tell it the other way round. The letter on our banner was a D for Dunmore, though my mother swore it stood for Dearly, which was her favourite word and no use to a man selling tickets in the rain.

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By the autumn of that year the big top had more patches than canvas, and Mr Cassius Hale, who had once juggled knives before a king, was counting coppers on the tailboard of the wagon. The elephant went first, to a farmer near Ludlow. The trapeze came down next. Only the castle stayed, a painted backdrop of turrets and one little arched door, hauled up behind the ring every evening. When young Ada Penrose asked why he would not sell it, he said a town will walk a long way to a door it thinks might open.

The last night there was no audience but three boys and a dog. Rain came sideways across the field, and the canvas split along the D with a sound like a sheet being torn for bandages. Hale stood in the gap with a lantern. Through the tear the castle showed, lit from behind and black against the storm, and the boys saw it from the hill, its turrets rising out of the wet grass as if they had been waiting. They walked down. They did not pay. Hale let them in anyway.

Next morning the wagons were gone, and the banner lay folded on the fence post by the lane, a scrap of card pinned beneath a stone in Hale's careful hand: Come in, the door is open. Bring your own light.