Colour tattoo of the Hogwarts school crest with a lion, a snake and ribbon banners, shown on the forearm.

Hogwarts crest with banners on forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A bold colour tattoo of a shield-shaped crest with a red quadrant holding a gold lion, a green quadrant with a snake, and a yellow quadrant with a badger. A purple ribbon banner arcs over the top and a second ribbon sits across the bottom, with lettering on both. Black outlines, small star shapes and smooth shading on the forearm frame the crest against a floral skirt.

Traditional Forearm Crest Shield Lion Snake Banner Ribbon Star Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Shuffle in under the awning, the lot of you, and mind the drip off the fishmonger's canvas. Rain like this always brings the old tale out of me. Forty years back there was a school up on the moor that sewed four animals onto its students' cloaks, each one a badge for a different kind of courage. A lion in gold on red. A snake on green. A badger on yellow. And a blue house that nobody talked about much.

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Agnes Pell was a laundress's girl from the back of Cutler Lane, and she wanted the badger more than she wanted her dinner. Her mother said badgers dig their living out of the dirt and never get handed a crown, so Agnes should set her sights lower. She didn't. She sat up nights at the kitchen table with a pot of ink and a bent steel nib, drawing the shield over and over on the backs of ration tickets until the lines came out clean. The gold bar-and-pillars in the middle she copied from a street sign at the crossroads, because it was the only gold thing she'd ever seen up close.

The sorting came in the wet spring. The old hat sat on her head and went quiet, and then it called out the yellow house, and Agnes stood up so fast her stool went over in the aisle. Nobody laughed. The badger table clapped her in like a long-lost cousin. It was only years later she learned the hat had hesitated over her for a good long while, because the girl had drawn the crest herself before ever being given one, and the hat had never seen anyone do that.

So when the rain comes in sideways like this, I take the tickets out of my coat and check the lines are still clean. They are. Agnes kept every one. Now, who's for a pie before the tide turns the gutters into rivers?