Colour tattoo of the Portuguese coat of arms with yellow castle towers and blue shield dots, set within a grey scrolled frame and yellow and green banners.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Portuguese coat of arms tattoo

Traditional · Colour · Photo

A close photograph of a large tattoo of the Portuguese coat of arms, with a red shield bearing a white cross of blue shields and yellow castle towers around its edge. The shield sits within a grey scrolled frame and yellow and green banners, all outlined in dark lines. Bold colour fills and a symmetrical composition dominate the image, with skin visible around the edges.

Traditional Shield Crest Castle Scrollwork Banner

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The council wanted the banner finished before the feast of Santo António, so Abílio and I carried the wooden frame out to the cork oaks at the edge of Vale de Lobos, where the light came through the bark in thin copper coins. He had no patience for the workshop any more. He said a shield was a thing to be looked at under open sky, so he laid the ochre out on a flat stone while I ground it with linseed until my wrists ached.

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The red field was the easy part. The five small blue shields were not. Each one had to sit exactly where his father had put them, and the old man pricked the dots with a bone awl, counting aloud the old way: one for each wound, five times over, and the thirty pieces of silver scattered between them like dropped seed. When I asked why the silver belonged in the arms of a country and not in the account book, he handed me the brush and told me to keep my mouth shut and my hand steady.

The castles were the trouble. The council's letter asked for six towers. Abílio painted seven, one above each corner of the shield and one more on the gold border, and when the clerk rode out from town to inspect the work he squinted at the banner and said nothing, because the old man had already rolled it tight and tied it with string. I suspected the seventh tower was for someone who had walked into those trees one winter and never walked out.

On the last evening I found him kneeling by the border with the finest brush clamped between his teeth. He was painting a single oak leaf, no bigger than a fingernail, into the base of that seventh tower, the same brown-green as the forest behind us. Nobody in the village would look that closely, he said, but the trees would know, and so would anyone who came looking for them.