Colour traditional-style tattoo of a gold crown set with pink jewels, outlined in black, on the lower torso.

Pink-jewelled crown tattoo on the torso

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

A tattoo of an ornate crown with olive-gold metalwork, scrollwork and a row of pink jewels set into the band and points. Bold black outlines define the shapes, with flat colour and soft highlights on the gold and gems. The crown is centred in the frame, with two fingers and a teal garment visible at the bottom edge.

Traditional Other Crown Jewel Gem Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The crown had come back from the polisher with two of its garnets missing, and Mrs Pike would not hear of glass replacements. "Real or nothing," she said, tapping the counter of the fairground stall with a gloved finger. Dennis Harrow, who had soldered every point of the thing himself over a wet winter in the back of his van, pretended the remark was about the weather.

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The fair was packed into the field behind the Wheatsheaf that August, all brass music and frying onions. The crown was meant for the Gala Queen, a sixteen-year-old called Tilly who worked the candyfloss machine and never looked up when people spoke to her. Dennis had shaped the band from old curtain rail and gilded it with a paste that smelled of pennies. He had set the pink stones himself, cheap glass cut to look like cherries, and he was prouder of them than he ever let on.

On the morning of the crowning, Mrs Pike arrived with a wooden box, opened it on the stall and lifted out two real garnets wrapped in a handkerchief. "My late husband bought these in Antwerp," she said. "He always said a crown should be worth stealing." She pressed them into the empty settings one at a time, and the glass cherries rolled off the counter into the grass like dropped sweets.

Tilly wore the crown up the field while the rain started, and by the time the band reached the bandstand the gilt had streaked her hair in thin gold lines. She laughed so hard she had to sit on the steps. That evening Dennis crawled through the wet grass with a torch, picked the glass cherries out one by one and dropped them in his tin, next to the spare bolts, in case the next crown needed them.