Traditional style colour tattoo of a gold badge reading Together in Paris, with green petals around its edge, on the upper back near the neck.

Together in Paris badge on upper back

Traditional · Back · Mixed · Photo

A round gold badge with a black outline sits on the upper back. The words TOGETHER IN PARIS run around and below a central ring, with two small flowers and leaves beside the ring. Green petal shapes extend from the outer edge of the badge, and the shading is flat with bold black linework.

Traditional Back Badge Circle Text Flower Leaves Petal Ring

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

You are fourteen the spring the Tinsmith's Guild sends you to the mill at Harrowmere, where the badge dies are cut and pressed. Your master, Oswin Pell, hands you a steel die with the lettering reversed so that it will read true only once it has been struck into gold leaf. Mind the R, he says, rubbing ink from his thumb. A backwards R in Paris is a country that never gets there. You nod as though you know what Paris is, and you have never asked, because in the Kingdom of Lessary the word belongs to the badges and nothing else.

Keep reading

The finished discs go up into the Vell Hills on the carts that carry salt and tin. Each one has a ring of green enamel petals cut around its rim and two small flowers set either side of a hollow at the centre, where a buyer's thumb is meant to rest while they wait for a letter that never comes. You stamp four hundred before the first frost. You never ask who buys them, and the carters never say.

In March a woman in a grey cloak comes to the mill with a coin pressed flat in her palm. She wants one badge with a name cut beneath the words, and she has the name written on a scrap of paper that has been folded so many times it has gone soft. Oswin refuses. The die is the Guild's, and the Guild does not do names. But you watch her count the coin out a second time, and you see her fingers shake the way your own did on your first morning at the press. That night you cut the name into the margin of the die where no one would think to look.

Years later a carter tells you a badge reached the coast road, and that a man in a torn coat wore it pinned to his collar while he waited for a ship. The gold had worn thin at the edge, but the R still read true, and the name beneath the words was still legible in the lamplight. He had never seen Paris, and neither had you. He did not need to.