Black and grey tattoo of a heraldic crest shield with a lion, a serpent, a badger and a large central letter H, on a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Heraldic crest shield tattoo on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large shield-shaped heraldic crest sits centred on the upper back, divided into four quadrants containing a lion, a serpent, a badger and foliage, with a large letter H in the middle. The linework is fine and dark with hatching and stippled shading that gives the figures an engraved look. The tattoo is entirely black and grey and fills most of the frame, with the top of the head and hair cropped at the top edge.

Back Crest Shield Lion Serpent Foliage

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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

Every September the windfalls came down faster than Mr Hobday could gather them, and the old school orchard turned into a hum of wasps and boys with grazed knees. I was the one sent to sort them, because I was thirteen and had the longest arms. The badger lived under the third row of Bramleys. Nobody had ever seen it, only its spoil heaps, fresh and damp, which Hobday swore he would fill with stones and was too tired to actually do.

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On the Thursday before open day I found the gate chain hanging loose and a small brass H, the sort that unscrewed from a trunk lid, lying in the grass between two split apples. Pell had been using the orchard as a den, and I suspected the H was his, since he kept a grass snake in a biscuit tin and called it Mrs Ansell after the matron. I took it to Hobday's shed. He turned it over and said it came from the old crest board in the hall, the one the governors had taken down when the roof leaked and nobody had put back. The lion had gone first, then the serpent, and the badger had faded to nothing with the paint.

I climbed the third row that evening and sat where the badger dug. The light went amber through the leaves, and a dark shape came up out of the soil and regarded me with no interest at all. I kept the brass H in my pocket. Hobday never asked for it back, and in October the board went up again with four quarters painted fresh, and I still say the badger was the best of them, because it was the only one that had really been there.