Traditional style colour tattoo of a blue cross wrapped in green vines and a grey banner reading Mom and Dad, on a limb.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue cross with Mom and Dad banner

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A blue cross with dark outlines and shaded highlights runs vertically across the limb, with green vines and leaves wrapping around its arms and shaft. A grey ribbon banner crosses the lower part of the cross and reads Mom above Dad. Colour ink dominates the design, and the lines are bold with simple shading against the skin.

Traditional Forearm Cross Vine Leaves Banner Mom Dad

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The paint was the wrong blue, and Dad knew it. He had mixed it from a tin of boat varnish and a dab of Nan's old emulsion, and he stood back from the garden wall with the brush dripping while the ivy carried on climbing the mortar as if nobody had asked it to.

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The cross had come off a demolished chapel on Hallam Row, four arms of cast iron with spurs at each end. Mum said it would look ridiculous in a back garden. Dad said it would look like something that had been kept. They argued about it for a whole summer, and by September the cross was up, painted the colour of a shallow sea, with green tendrils wound round its arms as if it had grown there.

Each spring I pruned the vines back from the metal, and each autumn they came back thicker, pushing leaves into every gap in the ironwork. Dad would stand at the kitchen window with his tea and say the ivy was doing the job for him, holding the cross to the wall without a single nail showing.

When we finally took it down to sell the house, the paint came away in blue flakes on my palms and the ivy tore free with its roots still in the brick. I wrapped the cross in an old bedsheet and carried it out to the van. The last thing I saw in the garden was a patch of pale stone the sun had never reached, the exact outline of four arms.