A shaded cross tattoo styled as a worn baseball with red stitching, on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Baseball-stitched cross on upper back

Realism · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large cross fills the frame, with its surface rendered as a cracked, worn baseball with red stitching running along each arm. The shading is soft and realistic, with grey outlines, brown and tan tones on the ball's surface, and darker shadows in the cracks. The cross sits centrally on the upper back, and the red stitching gives the only strong accent colour against the brown and grey.

Realism Back Cross Crack

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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 ball came over the wall during Vespers and landed in the herb bed with a sound like a dropped loaf. Brother Walter reached it first. He held it up to the light and turned it slowly, the way a man reads a letter he already knows the ending of. The leather had gone the colour of strong tea and split in fine lines across its face, but the red stitching was whole.

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The Abbot wanted it on the bonfire. Walter asked to keep it, so he went to the carpenter's shed, where I was planing a lectern board, and asked me for a cross. I told him I made furniture. He said a cross was four pieces of wood that had agreed to meet in the middle, and set the ball on my bench like a relic.

I made the arms from pew oak the damp had already started to fold and set the ball in the crossing, fixed with brass through its seams. It looked like something dug from a field that had decided to keep faith. Walter hung it above the refectory door, and the Abbot walked beneath it every day for a year without comment, which I took for approval.

Walter died in the winter the scriptorium roof leaked. In his cell we found a bottle of liniment and a note in his careful hand: The stitches are the only part that never gave. Keep the cross straight. I still hang it straight every Lent. The novices touch the red thread at the crossing before the morning bell, none of them can say why, and none of them has asked.