Small black castle tattoo with a curved arch above it on the back of a person's neck, above a white collared polka dot top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Castle tattoo on the back of the neck

Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A small black castle with turrets, a central spire and a flag sits beneath a thin curved arch on the back of the neck. The castle is drawn with simple solid linework and horizontal banding for shading, in black ink only. The photograph is taken from behind, with the hair pulled up and a white collar and navy polka dot top framing the tattoo at the centre.

Neck Castle Arch Spire Flag

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Frank Oduya had the last of the tickets to stamp before the 4.10 came in, but the wind off the platform kept lifting the cardboard box he had meant to carry out of the booking hall. Inside were the pieces of a model castle, the kind sold on the forecourt kiosk for a fiver, bought by a boy called Teddy who had wept when the flag snapped off the spire on the way home. Nobody had told him the glue needed a day to set.

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Frank found the lid under a bench, and the picture printed on it: towers, a pointed roof, a flag hanging straight in a painted sky. He had worked the signal box at this station for thirty-one years and knew arches. The iron ribs of the old train shed rose over the platforms like a rainbow someone had built in a hurry, and the castle on the lid sat beneath a sweep of line just like that, as if it had been waiting under the roof all along.

He took the box home and spent the evening at the kitchen table with a tin of black paint and a fine brush, banding the stone walls in short strokes the way his father had shaded the lamp housings on the old signals. By midnight the castle stood square and dark on the oilcloth, and the flag, when he finally got the wire to hold, was the last thing he touched.

On Saturday he wrapped it in a tea towel and carried it back to the station. Teddy was waiting on the ledge of the lost property hatch with his mother, and the boy took the parcel without a word, unwrapped it, and held the spire up to the light from the arch. Frank watched the 4.10 pull out behind them, its last carriage catching the sun, and thought the flag looked better than it ever had on the lid.