Black ink crown tattoo with fleur-de-lis points on the upper chest near the collarbone, shown beside a black off-shoulder top.

Crown tattoo on upper chest

Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A close view of a crown with five fleur-de-lis style points and small dots at the tips, shown in solid black ink. The design has a banded base with a shaded lower edge and a curved outline beneath it. The tattoo sits on the upper chest near the collarbone, with the shoulder and a black off-shoulder top filling the rest of the frame.

Chest Crown Fleur-de-lis

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brass crown had sat at the back of our chandlery for eleven years, wrapped in a scrap of sailcloth, before Abel Penhale came in on a wet Tuesday and asked for it by name. My father had hooked it out of the harbour mud with a boathook the winter the Maud Ellery went onto the Ness, and nobody had ever come forward for it, so it had become one of those things we moved from shelf to shelf whenever the stock was counted.

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It was smaller than people expected. Five points, each one a fleur-de-lis with a little bead of brass at its tip, and a broad band round the base that years of handling had polished until the lower edge went dark and soft, like the ring a mug leaves on a table. Someone had scratched the initials M.P. inside the rim, very neatly, with the point of a compass.

Abel didn't pick it up straight away. He stood with his cap in both hands and told me Marian had cast it in the forge behind the old net loft, the summer she decided the regatta needed a queen and she would be the one to make the crown. She never got it on anyone's head. The Maud Ellery went out that October with her husband aboard, and the regatta went to the baker's daughter that year, as it always did after a bad season.

"I thought the sea had kept it," he said. "I'm glad it gave it back."

I wrapped it again in the same sailcloth. At the door he turned the parcel over once, ran his thumb along the parcel where the band would be, and handed it back to me. "Put it on the shelf," he said. "It's had enough of being lost."