Colour tattoo of a grey crown with pink, blue and teal splashes above Roman numerals, on the inner wrist and forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crown with Roman numerals on a wrist

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A grey-shaded crown with studded detailing sits at the centre of the design, with pink, blue and teal washes splashed behind and beneath it. Roman numerals VIII XI LXVII run in black lettering across the top of the wrist. The photograph is taken straight on, showing the design across the inner wrist and forearm against a plain background.

Forearm Crown Roman numeral Splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tobias,

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The crown came in on Tuesday wrapped in a dyer's cloth, and Father would not let me touch it until he had weighed it twice. Silver, he said, or silver plate over tin, and the stones were paste. Someone had scratched VIII XI LXVII into the inside of the band with a nail. Eight, eleven, sixty-seven. Father thinks it is a bank account. I think it is a tide table for a boat that never came back.

The woman who left it had blue dye under her nails and a voice like a closed door. She said her husband had been a bargeman on the Sable and that the numbers were his days in the river fort, counted off on the wall of his cell. She wanted eleven shillings. Father offered four. She took three and a loaf of Mrs Harrow's bread and went off up Tanner Street without looking back at the window.

I have kept the crown on the shelf above the ledger. In the evenings, when the gas is low, the lamp light comes through the glass and throws pink and teal across the counter, as if someone has spilled the dye pots over the wood. It looks almost alive. I keep thinking of the bargeman counting down his days in a fort with nothing but a nail.

Father wants it cleaned and sold to a collector from the capital by Friday. I have told him I will do it. Come home when the Sable is in dock, and we can decide together who gets to keep the numbers.

Your sister, Wren