Black and grey realism tattoo of a cross with cracked edges on the upper back, shoulder blade area.

Cracked cross on upper back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large cross sits on the upper back near the shoulder blade, drawn with a raised, three-dimensional look. The edges are shaded with soft grey gradients and dark outlines, and thin fractures spread outward from the cross as if it is breaking through the skin. The image is entirely black and grey, with a plain, slightly warm skin tone around the tattoo and a blurred background.

Realism Back Cross Crack Shading

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

No, sit closer to the fire, the wind up here has teeth and likes to hear a tale before it bites. You see the cross on the saddle above Hollin Gap? Look at the lines running out of it like frost across a window. My grandmother's grandmother saw it split with her own eyes. Mind, she always said it was not the cold that did it.

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The gap had been a drovers' road since before the monks came over the hills. The grey gritstone cross was raised by a carter named Tobias Wenlow after his boy went over the scree in a blizzard. Every spring the carters cut a notch in its base and passed it with a hand laid flat on the shaft, the way you might touch a sleeping dog to say you are still there.

In the winter of the long snow, a girl called Nell Ashdown set out alone along the mule track to fetch physic for her mother in the valley. Her father shouted from the doorway that she must wait for the thaw. She did not wait. The storm shut the gap for nine days, and on the ninth morning the men who went up with shovels found the cross split from crown to foot. The cracks ran out across the stone like roots. Nell sat at its base with the medicine wrapped in her shawl and one hand pressed against the stone, as if she had been keeping it steady.

The stone did not break for her death, the old folk say. It broke to let the cold out of it. Some years the cracks grow a finger's width, and the carters say the mountain is counting its debts. So pass it quietly, lad, and lay your hand on the stone as you go.