Black fine-line cross tattoo on a back shoulder blade, with the script words Proverbs and 31:25 beside its lower stem.

Cross and Proverbs 31:25 on a shoulder blade

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A simple upright cross is drawn in solid black ink on the upper back, close to the shoulder blade. Beside the base of the vertical stroke, the word Proverbs is written in cursive script, with 31:25 in smaller plain numerals beneath it. The image is a close crop in warm, slightly uneven light, with the edge of a pink top visible on the right.

Lettering Back Cross Script Scripture reference Number

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself nearer the range, for this is a winter tale and it wants a warm backside to hear it properly. The snow had lain on Low Scarth since Martinmas, the ewes were heavy, and Agnes Pell had been up three nights running with the lantern.

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Her husband Tom wore a sheepskin coat his mother had worn before him, and the left elbow had worn through to the lining. Agnes would not put it on the fire. She sat with it by the window, the Bible open on the sill at the page her mother had marked with a goose feather. Strength and honour are her clothing, it said, and she read it aloud twice, the way you would read a bill you did not care for.

Tom came in stamping and asked what the book had to say for a man with a hole in his sleeve. Agnes told him the verse made no mention of sheepskin. She cut a square of grey wool from the offcut bag, pinned it over the join, and worked a cross in black thread, the upright long enough to reach the seam. Then, because she had her mother's habit, she stitched a word beneath it in her best hand. Proverbs. Thirty-one and twenty-five. She would rejoice in time to come, she said, and Tom said time to come was a long way off in February.

The coat outlived him by nine years. When Low Scarth was sold, the new family's boy found it on the hook by the back door and wore it out to the lambing. He never asked why the patch had a cross on it, or why the thread was starting to fray in a shape that looked, from the right angle, like a word. Agnes would have said that was the point.