Solid black design of a cross with arrowhead ends, a coiled serpent and a ring at the centre, topped by a crown and two wings, on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black cross with serpent, wings and crown

Black and grey · Flash

A solid black graphic of a cross with arrowhead tips on its arms and bottom, with a ring at the centre and a serpent wrapped around the vertical stem. A small crown sits above a pair of outstretched wings at the top. The image is flat black on white with no shading or gradient, so it reads as a stencil-like design rather than a photograph of skin.

Cross Serpent Wing Crown Arrow Ring

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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

Ada had been sent up to the crossroads with a pot of black paint and a brush worth more than her boots, because Mr Pryce's hands had started to shake and the parish wanted the signpost fresh before the fair. The post had stood there since the wool days, four arms cut from elm, each tipped with an arrowhead, and someone long dead had wound a carved serpent round its stem so the rain would run off its scales.

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She painted the arrows first, as she had been told: Market Hollin, Stannet, the chapel, the mill. When she reached the bottom arm, the one pointing at the marsh, the paint would not sit. It beaded on the wood like water on wax, and when she tried again the brush came back clean. An old carter going by with a cart of turnips stopped, squinted up at the crown above the wings, and said the post had been set to show the way home, not the way out, and that nobody had painted the marsh arm in forty years.

Ada wiped the brush on her apron and worked the ring at the centre instead, the one the serpent kept swallowing its own tail through. Then she walked all four roads with the carter's directions in her head, and came back by the white gate at dusk to find every arrow pointing at her.

The marsh arm had dried black by morning. Mr Pryce, sitting up in his bed with his cup of tea, said the paint had gone on easily enough for him once, and asked her which way she had come down.