Matching crown tattoos on ribs

You asked me last week whether the Ostrowski boys were really going to let me put a crown on each of them, and I told you the truth, which was that I had already drawn it twice on greaseproof paper before they came through the door. Their mother had died in March and they wanted something that belonged to both of them and to nobody else. Crowns, they said, because she used to call them her two little kings, and a king only needs a crown to be a king.

I spent the whole Thursday on the stencil. The older one wanted the points sharp as cut glass and the shading heavy underneath so the metal looked like it was catching lamplight. The younger one wanted the lettering above it, a line of Latin from the prayer card, and he made me write it out three times because my capitals kept leaning. I did it on the back of a gas bill because it was the only paper left in the drawer.

When it was done they stood side by side at the mirror in the back room, nobody speaking, and then the younger one laughed and said they looked like a pair of playing cards. Nobody has a better idea of what a card is for than a sailor's boy, so I left it there.

I have kept the stencil. It is pinned above my bench, gas bill and all, and every time I reach for the black I see the two of them in the glass, two kings with their hands in their pockets, waiting for the tram.

Yours, Bert