Back view of a person in a black cut-out swimsuit, with a small solid black cross tattoo on the upper back below the neckline.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black cross tattoo on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A back view of a person with arms raised above the head, wearing a black cut-out swimsuit against a grey rendered wall. A small solid black cross sits on the upper back, and a second, smaller tattoo with fine linework is partly visible near the hip. The image is in colour, but the tattoo ink is black and grey.

Back Cross

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dennis had been whittling since breakfast, and by the time the wasps found the windfalls under the Bramley rows he had a shape no bigger than a matchbox. He sat on an upturned crate by the press house, the grey render wall behind him gone green at the foot where the ferns had got a grip, and blew the shavings off his knees every few minutes like a man keeping dust off a good suit. The wood was from the limb that came down in February, the one that nearly took the gate. He'd dragged it into the shed and let it dry out all summer, and now he said it was ready.

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He wouldn't tell me who it was for. I asked twice and he only turned the little cross over in his fingers, testing the arms against the light, the way he checks a pear for bruising. It was plain, no curls or notches, just two strokes of pale apple wood crossed hard in the middle. Once he was satisfied he took a length of baler twine from his pocket and threaded it through a hole he'd drilled at the top, and then he sat looking down the lane towards the road.

Tess came up it a little after four, rucksack on one shoulder, boots kicking up dust that hung gold in the low sun. She and Dennis had not spoken since the spring, since the row about selling the top field to the developers. She stopped at the gate, and Dennis stood up slowly, and neither of them said anything. He held out the cross on its twine. She took it, looked at it for a long time, and then put it over her head and tucked it under her shirt without a word.

I went back to counting crates. Behind me the wasps kept at the windfalls, and somewhere in the hedge a blackbird was complaining about the heat. When I looked up again the lane was empty and Dennis was rubbing at the wood dust on his palms, his face the same as always, except that he had started whistling.