Black and grey crown tattoo with beaded arches, a fleur-style finial and floral details, centred on the upper back in a traditional style.

Shaded crown on upper back

Traditional · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large crown sits centred on the upper back, drawn with bold outlines and built up with grey shading. Its arches are formed of rows of beads, and the band carries small flower and leaf motifs. The crown is shown against plain skin with a thin chain at the neck and a grey top draped at the bottom edge of the frame.

Traditional Back Crown Bead Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The barge Patience had lain at Coldharbour lock for three winters before anyone thought to ask who had sunk the crown in the silt. Hester Pim asked, because she was the one who raked the lock cut with a bucket, and because her father could no longer stand long enough to do it himself.

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It was no bigger than a cupped hand, with arches of little round beads gone green at the seams and a band stitched with flowers and leaves, each one black with river muck. Her father turned it over in the lamplight and said the Queen of the Lenn had dropped it when she crossed on the ferry. Hester said the Queen of the Lenn was a tale the carriers told to sell ale. He laughed until he coughed, then said a crown taken from the water ought to go back to it, or the river would keep the boats waiting.

She rowed out past the last moored hull at dusk, the crown in a biscuit tin on her knee. At the weir she tipped it over the side, and the beads went down one by one, flashing like minnows. The water took the band last, slowly, as if it were reluctant. In the morning the lock gates swung open on their own, or so the lock-keeper swore, and the Patience went through first, riding high and empty. Her father never asked where the beads had gone. He only kept one green bead in his waistcoat pocket, and when the cold came he would turn it between his finger and thumb, the way a man checks his own luck.