Black and grey shaded crown tattoo with ball finials and a swirling script letter below, on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Shaded crown with swirling script on the ribs

Neo-trad · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A three-dimensional crown with ball-topped points and a row of diamond-shaped gems along its band, shaded in soft greys to give volume. A flowing script letter with a long tail sits beneath the crown, with a fine swash curling out to the left. The tattoo is centred on a side view of the torso, with a dark garment visible at the right edge.

Neo-trad Ribs Crown Gem Script letter Swirl

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The people of Skerrow still argue over whether the crown came from the sea or from the harbour wall, but nobody argues about the letter. Old Mairi Brodie cut it into the stone above the slipway the winter the fleet failed to come home, a tall curling letter with a tail that ran down past the tide line. When the children asked who it was for, she said it was for whoever was still out there and could not see the lamp.

Keep reading

She built the crown the next spring from pewter spoons melted in her kitchen grate. She hammered the points thin, topped each with a ball no bigger than a gull's egg, and set seven pale pebbles along the band, picked from the cove where the boats used to land. Every family brought her something to add: a thimble from one house, a broken clasp from another, a tin button bright as a coin. By midsummer the crown had more bits than metal, and it was heavier than any real crown should be.

The storm that came in October took the crown off the wall in a single night. Nobody slept. In the morning the lamp-keeper's grandson went down the rocks and found it wedged in the weed below the slipway, rolled tight round a length of driftwood, its finials polished so bright the boy could see his face in them. The letter on the stone was still there with its tail pointing out to sea, and the fog was lifting off the water.

Mairi never put the crown back up. She said the sea had only borrowed what it needed, and that a thing made by the whole island should be carried by the whole island. The lamp-keeper's boy kept it on the windowsill of the schoolhouse, and when the boats came round the point each evening the children counted the pebbles to see that none had gone.