Black crown design filled with white mountain and pine tree linework, with the lettering you my are king and PSALM 44:4, shown as a flat drawing with no body placement.

Crown with mountains and lettering

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A solid charcoal crown silhouette with five rounded points contains white engraved-style linework of mountains and pine trees along its lower half. The phrase you my are king is set across the centre in white script and bold serif lettering, with the reference PSALM 44:4 in small capitals beneath. The design is flat and high contrast, with a few small white birds in the upper part of the crown.

Lettering Crown Mountain Pine tree Lettering Bird Psalm

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The crown was never gold. The old people of Harrowdale said the first king had shaped it from the dark rock above the tree line, five peaks that the snow took every winter and gave back every spring. When the valley folk went looking for a ruler, they passed the lords in their velvet cloaks and climbed instead to the sheep-hut where Aldo Brin kept his flock alone.

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They asked him what he wanted. He said he wanted the pines left standing, the birds given somewhere to nest, and nobody cutting the high slopes for timber while the lords were quarrelling over the lower fields. The lords laughed. The people did not. So they carried him down on their shoulders, singing the line the mountains had taught them, though no two of them agreed on the words, and the wind carried off half of it. What reached the village sounded like you my are king, and that was how the song was sung ever after.

He ruled for forty years by one rule. Every tree felled had to be replanted before the next thaw, and the birds were counted at each new moon, because a kingdom with no birds in it was already being lost. When a hard winter came and the lords marched up demanding the high pines for their roofs, Aldo did not argue. He walked them to the ridge, pointed at the snow lying deep on the far side, and asked which of them would be first to go down and fetch the wood.

They went home. When Aldo died, the valley children climbed up to the hut and found his crown-stone lying where he had left it, with a single swallow's feather tucked into a crack in the top peak. They left it there. Every spring, the first birds to come back over the ridge are still said to be counting him.