Matching crown and ornate letter wrist tattoos

The officer at Kessel asked me twice whether the crown on my wrist was a stamp from some club. I told him it was a bet I lost, which is the story Dad tells about his own. You will remember the ink was his idea before it was mine. Three weeks ago he came back from the Hollin market with a tin of grey pencils and a grin, and by Sunday we had drawn matching crowns on each other's arms, copied from the coins he keeps in the biscuit tin, then argued for an hour about the lettering.

The officer took our papers under the lamp and held them up to the light the way you'd check a banknote. Behind us a lorry driver was singing something off-key in Polish, and the queue smelled of diesel and wet wool. I kept my wrist turned inward, the way you do when you don't want a stranger memorising a thing he could later describe. The letters beneath the crowns are your initial and mine, scrolled so heavily that Dad had to squint to make the loops look right.

He stamped us through without a word, then looked at the two wrists lying side by side on the counter and sighed as if he had seen this sort of foolishness before and missed it. Past the barrier there was a bench, a vending machine and a sign in three languages telling us to keep moving. We sat there anyway.

At the gate you pressed your wrist against mine, the way we used to swear promises behind the school bins, and the two crowns sat together on the bare skin, a little crooked and still smudged at the edges. Pass me the pencil, you said, and I wrote the date under mine, the one thing from that week we had not yet agreed how to carry.