Black and white photo of two small crown tattoos on the fingers of a pair of hands, one an outline crown and one solid black, in fine line and blackwork styles, against a white brick wall.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small crowns on two fingers

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two hands are pressed together, showing a small outlined crown on one finger and a small solid black crown on a neighbouring finger. The outline crown uses thin, delicate linework with a shaded band at its base, while the solid crown is a bold silhouette with a simple, flat fill. The photograph is black and grey, with soft lighting and a plain white brick wall behind the hands.

Fine line Blackwork Hand Crown Outline Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift had been dead since Easter, so we took the stairs, nineteen floors of them, Dess counting out loud to make me lose my breath on purpose. We were eleven the first time we drew on each other with a biro from the chemist's counter. She insisted on a proper crown for herself, outlined and fussy, with a band of shading along the bottom so it looked like it had weight. Mine was a solid black lump because I could never manage the little points. She said mine looked like a bin lid. I said a king didn't need points, and she said that was exactly what a king would say.

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Biro doesn't last, which we thought was the whole point, a promise that didn't have to be kept. Dess moved to Hull when her mum remarried, and I stayed on the ninth floor with my dad and his bad knee. The block came down in March. A man from the council gave us a clipboard with a form asking whether we wanted rehousing in Ferndale or in a new place by the retail park, and neither of us could pick.

She came back for the demolition, which I hadn't expected. We stood on the sixth-floor landing where her nan used to leave the door on the latch. The stairwell wall was still that bright white brick, scrubbed and scratched, and at the height of a child's reach there was a faint grey smudge where a crown had been rubbed out years ago by somebody's sleeve. Dess crouched and tapped it with one finger, as if checking it was still there.

Inside the empty flat, under a bare bulb, she took the clipboard from me and ticked the box for the retail park. Then she wrote my name beside hers in capitals, the way we used to in the back of exercise books, and handed it back. Outside, a crane swung the first window frame clean out of the wall. Neither of us looked away.