Dark blackletter capital D design with a castle silhouette and four-point stars inside the bowl, drawn on a cream background, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement visible.

Blackletter D with castle silhouette

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A large gothic blackletter capital D in solid dark brown ink on a cream background. Inside the bowl of the letter sits a castle silhouette with several spires and an arched doorway, accompanied by three small four-point stars. The design is flat and bold with no shading, and the letter fills most of the square frame.

Lettering Castle Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sign over the gate at Dunmere had been weathered to a grey nothing by forty winters of sea wind, but the D at its head had held. Nobody could say why. I climbed the ladder with my brushes tied in a sack and a pot of brown size, meaning to match the old blackletter stroke by stroke before the council came round with their questions.

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Mrs Pell, who kept the lodge, watched me from the bottom rung with a cup of tea going cold in her hands. "Mind the castle," she said. "My brother painted that inside the bowl when they were both boys, and he'd never let anyone touch it." I asked which castle. She pointed up at the broken towers behind us, standing black against the sky, then laughed and shook her head. No, the little one, she said, the one with three stars that their father swore were the windows of heaven.

I found the castle with the tip of my brush, a small clean silhouette, its arched door no bigger than a thumbnail. Three stars had been dabbed in with a single touch each, and one had flaked away to bare board. I did not repaint it. I painted the D around the castle exactly as it was, leaving the spires dark against the cream, and when I came down Mrs Pell had already gone inside.

The next morning there was an envelope tucked under my van wiper with a brass key inside and a note in pencil: Tell him the castle is still standing.