Black dotwork crown tattoo centred on the back of a person's neck, with blonde hair pulled up above it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crown tattoo on the back of the neck

Dotwork · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A small black crown with a fleur-de-lis finial sits centred on the back of a person's neck, shown from behind. The crown is built from solid black fills and rows of round dots forming the beading along the rim and arches. The skin is pale and even, with the blonde hair pulled up and a dark red background framing the composition.

Dotwork Neck Crown Fleur-de-lis Dot

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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

The landlady at Marram House counts the teaspoons twice a day, and by the second week of August she has decided you are the one taking them. You are not. What you have taken is the biscuit tin from the hall shelf, the one with a crown pressed into its lid, a small fleur-de-lis standing on top and the rim beaded with raised dots like pearls along a collar. Its hinge has snapped. Nobody has opened it since the Coronation, she says, and nobody should.

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On the Thursday, when the rain comes sideways off the bay and the lounge smells of wet wool, you sit at the kitchen table with a tube of glue and a butter knife and prise the lid up. Inside there are no biscuits. There are postcards, a bus ticket from Weymouth, and a bundle of letters tied with string, all addressed in the same looping hand to Mrs E. Pellow, Room Four. The stamps are old enough to be worth something to the man at the stall on the front.

You read the first letter standing up and the last one sitting down. They are from a fishing lad who wrote every Sunday for three summers, and by the end his handwriting has gone small and careful, as if he were afraid of running out of paper. Each one finishes with a little drawing of a crown, dotted round the edges, pressed hard enough to dent the page. The final letter says only that he has been given a berth on a boat out of Brixham and that she is not to wait up.

When the landlady comes in with her spoon count, you have already glued the hinge and set the tin back on the shelf with the letters folded inside. She looks at it for a long time. "He always did draw his crowns too big," she says, and goes to put the kettle on, and you notice she has stopped counting.