Small colour tattoo of a castle within a dark arch with a mouse head silhouette, placed at the top of the upper back below the nape of the neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Castle and mouse silhouette on upper back

Back · Colour · Photo

A small tattoo of a castle with several spires sits inside a dark arc, with a mouse head silhouette at its base. The castle is filled with horizontal bands of pink, purple, blue and red, with a thin dark outline and a few dots suggesting stars above. The photo is taken from behind a seated woman in a dark sleeveless top, with the tattoo centred in the frame against a plain indoor background.

Back Castle Arch 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

Now shift closer, for the lamp is low and the tale is long. You want the kingdom of Aldermere, which you will not find on any map, because the mapmakers were too busy counting their sheep to bother. Its castle had seven spires, each striped by the sunrise, so from the valley it looked like a stack of ribbons somebody had dropped in a hurry: pink at the top, then plum, then a blue that tasted of cold well water, then red down at the base where the bread ovens roared.

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Under the great gate lived a mouse called Tobin Quill, and his work was the stars. Every dusk he climbed the iron ladder with a sack of silver pins and fixed the stars to the dark arch of the sky, one by one, so the king could sleep. One winter the new clerk oiled the hooks with goose fat to keep them from squeaking, and by morning half the stars had slid off and lay scattered in the frost of the courtyard like spilt salt. The king sent word that the sky would be fixed by Candlemas or the clerk would be sent to the moon.

Tobin did not climb for the king. He climbed the tallest spire, the one with the cracked weathervane, because a mouse knows the fastest way up is the way nobody is looking. At the top the wind tried to pry him loose, and he hung on by his tail and his stubbornness, and pressed each star back into the sky with his small grey paws. The kingdom woke to find the dark spotted again and the arch crowned with light, and nobody ever learned who had done it.

Even now, on the mornings the frost is thick, you can see him sitting at the foot of the gate with his round ears against the first red band of dawn. The bakers swear he has never once come down before the bread is out, and they leave him the heel of every loaf, which is only fair, my friend, since he is the reason anyone can see the sky at all.