Black and grey Traditional style tattoo of a detailed crown above a blackletter R and a line of Roman numerals, on the calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crown and blackletter R on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A detailed crown with beaded edges and a cross on top sits above a gothic blackletter letter R and a line of small Roman numerals. The crown is shaded in black and grey with bold outlines and fine highlights, and the lettering is solid black. The photograph is taken straight on, with the calf filling most of the frame against a pale tiled floor.

Traditional Calf Crown Blackletter Roman numeral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift had been dead since the Tuesday in April, and Mrs Okafor on the ninth floor had started calling the stairwell the long way up, as if it were a scenic route. Fourteen flights with a pushchair and a bag of potatoes is a sort of penance. Dad used to say the block was a kingdom with no king, which was rubbish, because on our landing we had Rory Doyle, who ran the bins, the lost-property box and the list of lift engineers nobody ever rang back.

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Rory had gone to a shop on Sheaf Street with his savings and come home wanting a crown on the stairwell wall, not on himself. He borrowed a tin of gloss from the caretaker, copied the outline from a sheet of flash he'd bought off a lad at the bus station, and painted it on the wall between the seventh and eighth floors, with the bead edges done in a blunt brush that made every bump look like a gentle sneeze. Under the crown he wrote a big gothic R, the way Nan used to sign her Christmas cards, and under that the date, twenty-second of April two thousand and seven, the day she was let out of hospital and first climbed these stairs on his arm, stopping every landing to tell him off for lagging.

The council man came with a roller and a face like a wet Sunday. He stood at the bottom of the flight, squinted up at the wall, and said he'd give it till Friday. By Friday somebody had stuck a tea light on the windowsill beneath the R, somebody else had taped a laminated photo of a dog wearing a paper crown, and Mrs Okafor had hung a string of fairy lights from the handrail. The roller stayed in its tray. Now when the lift works nobody uses it. We all walk up past the painted crown, and I touch the R for luck on the way, which is daft on fourteen floors, but it is the only landing in the building where somebody has ever bothered to write the date down.