Realism style skull wearing a gold crown above a grey banner reading True till death, tattooed on a calf in mixed grey and colour ink.

Skull and crown with banner on a calf

Realism · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A shaded grey skull wearing a gold crown with red and blue gem details sits above a grey banner with the words True till death. The skull uses soft shading and highlights, while the crown is rendered in colour. The tattoo is on a lower leg above a white sneaker, photographed on a stone pavement.

Realism Lettering Calf Skull Crown Banner Gem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had polished the crown for three days before the abbot allowed him to set it on the skull. The gold was beaten thin in the forge behind the scriptorium, and the red and blue stones were not garnets at all but chips of the old chapter-house glass, cut to fit by a lay sister who had since gone blind. "It must sit level," the abbot said, "or the king will know."

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The skull had come up from the crypt in a sack of lime. It belonged to Edric of the Marches, who had sworn at his coronation that his crown would stay on his head until death and then on his bones. The monks had painted his oath on a strip of linen and fixed it beneath the jaw, and the letters had faded to the grey of wet slate. Anselm scraped a fleck of mortar from the teeth and wondered who had tied the knot so tightly.

The rider came on the feast of Saint Brendan, when the bell was already rung for compline. He wore a surcoat with the Marcher lion and asked for the crown in a voice that expected to be obeyed. Anselm led him down the cold stair to the crypt, lamp shaking in his hand, and showed him the skull grinning in its niche with the glass stones catching the light.

The stranger looked for a long time. Then he laughed, quietly, and said the old king had been a liar about everything but his bones. Anselm picked up the linen banner, the one thing the man had not asked about, and found the stitching on the back. It read in a different hand, his own, from a year he could no longer remember. He folded it twice and put it in his sleeve.