Two black and grey crown tattoos with the words One Life and One Love in script, shown on the wrists of two clasped hands.

Matching crown tattoos on two wrists

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two wrists show matching crown tattoos, each with script beneath: One Life on the left and One Love on the right. The crowns are shaded in black and grey with detailed linework, and the lettering is a flowing black script. The hands are clasped together in the centre of the frame against a soft, blurred dark background.

Lettering Forearm Crown Script Hand Wrist Matching

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The signwriter came up from Reading in a van that smelled of turpentine and wet dog, and he wanted to know which of us was paying for the crowns. Mum said the boat belonged to all of us equally, so the crowns would be equal too. He laughed, skipped the stencil and painted them freehand, one on each cabin door at the same height above the gunwale, with a small wobble on the left one that he refused to fix.

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Underneath he lettered One Life on the port side and One Love on the starboard. Dad said it was soppy and that the lock-keeper at Hungerford would have something to say about it. He did, the following spring, when the paint had gone chalky and a gust had pushed us sideways into the reeds. He stood on the balance beam with his hands in his coat pockets and read the doors aloud, slowly, as though checking the spelling.

We kept to the Thames route for eleven years after that. Each winter Dad sanded the crowns back and touched up the gilt on their points, and each winter the wobble came back through the paint. Mum said it was the only honest thing about the boat.

The last time I saw it moored, the crowns caught the low sun at Boulter's Lock, both of them doubled in the still water below the gates. Nobody had ever fixed the left one. I left it as it was.