Fine line black tattoo of the Hogwarts banner and a tower on a wrist, shown beside an illustrated Marauder's Map.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hogwarts banner and tower on a wrist

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo of a Hogwarts pennant banner with the word HOGWARTS and a turret sits on the wrist, set against a photo of the illustrated Marauder's Map showing the castle. The linework is thin and mostly solid black with little or no shading, and the banner has a slightly curled ribbon tail. The left half of the frame is the warm brown and red map artwork, and the right half is the close-up of the wrist on a dark background.

Fine line Other Banner Tower Castle

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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 map arrived at the conservation bench in a biscuit tin, folded in quarters and wrapped in a grey school jumper that still smelled of pear drops. Mr Abernethy, who had run the paper lab at the print house for thirty-one years, lifted the lid, looked at it for a long moment, and said only, 'Don't let the ink touch your sleeve.' The castle was drawn in brown and rust, its towers leaning over the page as if they were listening, and across the top someone had penned a pennant in tight, careful capitals. Nobody could say who had left it with a bequest of Victorian tide tables.

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I spent a fortnight on the thing. I lifted the foxing from the corner with a swab, eased the creases with a bone folder, and lined the tower edges with a fine nib. Each evening I walked home along the canal with a smudge of ink on my cuff that I refused to scrub. On the eleventh day I found a faint pencil note beneath the lower margin, written in a hand that rushed its loops: Ask the boy by the bins. I laughed out loud, the way you do alone in a lab, and Mr Abernethy shouted from the back that the paper didn't care whether I was amused.

The boy by the bins turned out to be an apprentice at a tattoo shop off Deansgate, with two pounds fifty in his pocket and no idea what the note meant. He had bought the tin at a car boot sale because of the pennant on the lid, which he said was the same banner he'd inked onto a customer's wrist that week, copied straight from the map's corner. We stood in the drizzle while he showed me the photo on his phone. The ribbon tail curled exactly as the original did, and the little turret beside it looked nothing like a real tower, which I suppose is how copies go.

I handed the tin back to him that afternoon. The note, I decided, could wait for whoever wrote it to come asking.