Colour tattoo of a circle with a brown cross, arrowhead tips, yellow binding and grey feathers, on the upper thigh, in a traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cross, feathers and circle on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A brown cross with stone-look arrowhead tips sits over a thin circle, with yellow binding wrapped at each join. Two grey feathers with dark quills hang from the arms, and strings of red and blue beads dangle from the lower end. Bold black outlines and soft shading give the design a traditional look, set against pale skin.

Traditional Thigh Cross Circle Feather Arrowhead Bead Wheel

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hoop had been sitting on the bench since March, half-bound, with the yellow waxed thread still hanging from the last join where Dad had set his tools down. Nell picked it up on a wet Saturday and found the rest of the kit in the biscuit tin under the vice: four ash shafts he had squared himself, two points cut from slate and rubbed smooth on the back step, a bag of grey feathers saved from the pigeons that roosted in the yard, and a card in his capitals that said FOR THE GIRL, NOT FOR THE SHOP.

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She had never done binding. Her father always made the knots look easy, a double half-hitch and a tuck, and she spent the first hour unpicking her own attempts at the cross-join while the kettle boiled twice and went cold. The radio in the kitchen talked about the tide at Whitby. By the time the light turned orange through the window she had the arms seated true, the circle running clean through all four joins, and the feathers lashed on with their quills facing the same way, the way he had always insisted, so the wind could find them.

On the last arm she threaded the beads. Red, blue, red, blue, as he did, and then one she didn't recognise, pale and cracked, that must have come from a drawer she had never opened. She tied it off and sat back, and the shed was quiet except for the clock. When she breathed on the hoop it turned a little on its string, and the feathers lifted and settled, and she left the door open so the last of the light could reach the bench.