Two matching crown tattoos on a pair of forearms, painted in a loose watercolour style with splashes of red, pink, green and blue.

Watercolour crowns on two forearms

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Two forearms are pressed together, each showing a crown tattoo drawn with loose, sketchy black linework. The crowns are filled with washes of red, pink, green and blue that bleed past the outlines, and dark splashes sit around the base of each design. The background is a blurred, colourful painted surface.

Forearm Crown

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The painter of Hollin Cross kept two brushes and one rule: never draw a crown inside the lines. Her father had told her that a king who keeps to the lines will keep his kingdom small.

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Two brothers came to her shed the spring the river flooded, each wanting a crown on his arm so the village would know who was to rule when the old man died. She took a charcoal stick and drew both crowns in quick black strokes, then washed them with red madder, green from the marsh moss, pink from the last of the rose bark, and blue from the cold tide water. The colour ran past the edges where the lines stopped, as colour always does when it is in a hurry.

The elder brother complained that his crown was smudged. The younger said nothing, but he laid his arm against his brother's while the paint was still wet, and the two crowns touched until the red of one bled into the green of the other. "Now nobody can tell them apart," the painter said, "so neither of you can rule alone."

They argued until dusk, then sat on the bench outside and shared the bread she had left on the step. The river went down in summer and the crowns faded to ghosts on their skin, but the village still speaks of the two kings who ruled from one table, and the shed still smells of wet charcoal at the first rain.