Fine line black tattoo of a cross and angular symbols on the inner forearm near the wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cross and angular symbols on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small black tattoo of a horizontal line crossed by a vertical stroke, next to a row of angular symbols that resemble stylised letters. The linework is thin and even, and the ink is solid black with no shading. The tattoo sits centrally on pale skin against a patterned fabric backdrop.

Fine line Forearm Cross Symbol Glyph

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

Brother Anselm has taken the good ink again, and you find him at the slope-topped desk with the lamp guttering and his sleeve pushed back. He does not look up. "The abbot wants the psalter finished by Lauds," he says, "and you have made every G too round."

Keep reading

You take the pen anyway. Copying is slow work, one letter after another, but in the margins of the old Latin there is a second alphabet, pricked out so faintly that only someone who has sat beside the same desk for ten winters would notice it. Anselm made it as a novice, he tells you, so that a reader would need a key and the key would need a friend. The marks are angular, like broken rafters. A short bar struck through by a single stroke means keep. A hooked sign like a shepherd's crook means the cellar door is unbarred.

In February the abbot sends Anselm to the island house, where the boats come in only when the sea allows. He leaves without a farewell, only a folded scrap pushed under your candlestick. On it is the whole key, drawn with the same thin, even hand that once taught you the difference between a minim and a hairline.

You finish the psalter in March. The abbot praises the clean hand and the even spacing and turns the leaves with a thumb that never pauses. Where the margin mark sits beside the ninth psalm, the abbot's eye skips over it, as it has always skipped over Anselm's small mischiefs. You leave it there, black and precise, waiting for someone who knows where to look.