Upper back of a woman in a white towel and robe, showing a black cross tattoo and a colourful design on the shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black cross and colour shoulder tattoo

Back · Mixed · Photo

A woman is photographed from behind, wearing a white towel wrapped around her head and a white robe embossed with a crown and the words Princess Soft. A solid black cross tattoo sits on the upper back, and a multicoloured design with reds and greens extends across the shoulder, though its detail is soft. The bright blue sky, hills and town below form the background, with the subject filling the centre of the frame.

Back Shoulder Cross Floral

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

The ground is still soft from the night's rain when you climb the ladder to the Vesna wagon and find Mrs Okonedo already waiting, arms folded, a mug of tea going cold on the step. "The cross goes on first," she says. "Black, and no wobbling. The roses can wait for the paint to set." You have been her hand for three seasons now, long enough to know she does not mean the cross is holy. She means it keeps the damp out of the wood, and that is the only prayer a travelling fair ever needs.

Keep reading

So you mix the black until it lies flat on the brush, and you draw the upright, then the arm, slow as a man signing a lease. Along the shoulder panels the lilies come next, reds bleeding into greens where the light from the Ferris wheel lands on them at dusk. Your hands ache. The gulls over the car park do not care. Somewhere behind you the generator coughs and the carousel starts its tinny waltz, and you keep painting because the wagon has to be on the road by Monday.

Mrs Okonedo comes back at noon, looks at the cross for a long time, and sets the mug down beside your tin. "Crooked," she says, and you feel the old fear, until she adds, "Good. Nobody trusts a straight line on a fairground." Then she climbs up and takes the other brush herself, and by the time the lamps come on you have both painted the last petal, and the wagon, glossy and absurd, stands in the mud like something that has always belonged there.