Neo-traditional colour tattoo of Hogwarts castle inside a crystal ball, framed by green leaves and red berries, with a HOGWARTS banner, on a calf.

Hogwarts castle in a crystal ball on a calf

Neo-trad · Calf · Colour · Photo

A crystal ball shows the Hogwarts castle silhouetted against a teal and green night sky with stars, its windows glowing orange. Green leaves and red berries surround the ball, and a banner beneath it reads HOGWARTS. Bold black outlines define the design, with saturated colour fills and soft shading on the glass.

Neo-trad Calf Castle Leaves Berry Banner Night sky Star Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The glass ball sits between the sherry decanter and a tin of Quality Street, and your Auntie Maureen has been buffing it with her cardigan sleeve since the speeches. Nobody else has paid it any attention, which is how you know it was meant for you. The village hall smells of floor polish and warm prosecco, and the bride's cousins have dragged the chairs into a corner to make room for a conga that keeps going wrong.

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You sit on the folding stool beside it and lean close. Inside, a castle climbs out of black water under a sky more green than blue, stars pricked through it like salt flicked from a fingertip. Its windows burn orange, tower after tower, and a figure might be crossing the highest parapet, though you could be wrong. Maureen says her mother bought the ball at a jumble sale for twenty pence and swore it never once told her a lie, only things she was not yet ready to read.

'Go on, then,' says Maureen, and slides a paper napkin under it like a coaster. 'Ask it something proper.' You ask whether the couple will last, and the stars begin to slide, slow as a tide going out. Three windows go dark, then four. The glass clouds for a moment, and you wipe it with your thumb the way she did, but the grey stays put.

Then one window high in the tallest tower flickers, and you realise it is not showing the future at all, only the room you are sitting in: the strip lights, the conga line, the bride laughing with her head thrown back. Somebody lights a candle on the cake. You hand the ball back to Maureen, who holds it up to the lights and says, 'There, that's the proper answer.'