Black line drawing of a crown above crossed arrows, a diamond at their centre and the letters N, A, X and J, on a plain white background.

Crown, crossed arrows and diamond design

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing of a crown at the top, with two arrows crossing in an X shape beneath it. A faceted diamond sits at the centre of the crossing, with the letters N, A, X and J placed around it and a small circle beneath the N. The linework is clean and even on a plain white background, with no shading and no colour.

Fine line Crown Arrow Diamond Letter Initial

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had already buried the second cairn when Mother pushed the lantern into my hands and told me not to dawdle. Four carriers were somewhere above the Crooked Saddle with a fortnight's salt, and every one of them had been promised the pass was open.

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At the crossing, where the two old trails cut through each other like dropped sticks, someone had chiselled a sign into the boulder long before my grandmother's time: two arrows crossed in an X, a cut crystal set in the middle, and four letters around it, N, A, X and J. Father said they were the four families who first walked the pass, each claiming a corner of the compass. I never thought an arrow pointing nowhere was much use, but the crystal caught my lamp and threw it back in a hard white star, and that was the light the carriers were watching for.

I found the first of them under the ledge, a boy with two blackened fingers, and the rest strung out behind him like beads on a wet string. Old Dorrit came last. He had cut the small circle beneath the N himself, he said, so a man could tell his own marker from a lie. He grinned at the lamp and told me the stone was made to throw light, not to hold it.

We stood together on the crown of the saddle while the wind tried to take our hats. Below us the valley was still black, but the star on the rock blazed back up at us, and when the first carrier laughed, the dark slid off the slopes like a cloth pulled from a table.