Traditional style crown tattoo with a cross on top, shaded in red and grey, flanked by two small black stars on a forearm.

Crown and stars on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A crown with a cross on its peak sits on the forearm, with two small solid black stars on either side. The crown is outlined in dark ink and shaded in grey and deep red, with dotted detailing along its band. The background is dark, which makes the pale skin and coloured ink stand out clearly.

Traditional Forearm Crown Cross Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The old well at Cinder Wash had been dry for two summers when the stranger came up the road with a crown tied to his saddle. Nobody in the caravan trusted it. The metal was dull red gold, the velvet band worn through, and the cross on its peak had been bent flat as if someone had once sat on it. Ruth Abernethy, who kept the water ledger, wrote his name down anyway, because the ledger had never refused anyone.

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He wanted the well opened. The keeper, a thin man called Samuel Dunn, told him the water belonged to the stars, the way the old folk said, and that a king had once paid for it with three nights of silence. The stranger laughed and said the king had been his grandfather, and that the crown was proof. Ruth looked up at the black stars over the wash, hard and sharp as nail heads, and thought the old folk were usually right about the stars and wrong about most everything else.

So they made a bargain at the ledger table. Each night the stranger would take one star from the crown's band and name it aloud, and each night the caravan would hear him. On the ninth night he ran out of stars and the well began to rise. Water came up cold and brown in the bucket, and Ruth chalked the depth onto the post in figures she could read in the dark.

When the carts moved on at dawn, the crown was hanging on the well's iron hook, with a single star missing from either side of it. Ruth took it down and carried it east, where the road forked. She left it on a milestone for whoever came next, and the water kept rising behind her.