Traditional style tattoo on a thigh showing a shaded grey cross wrapped in thorns, two red roses, grey clouds, small birds and the script words 'If heaven wasn't so far away'.

Cross, roses and heaven quote on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A shaded grey cross wrapped with a thorny vine sits at the centre of the design, flanked by two red roses with black outlines and grey clouds behind them. Small dark birds appear among the clouds, and the words 'If heaven wasn't so far away...' run along the bottom in black script lettering. The image uses bold outlines with grey shading and a few areas of red ink, and the design is centred in a close, straight-on photo of the skin.

Traditional Lettering Thigh Cross Rose Thorn Cloud Bird Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, you'll want the shade of the bus wall for this, because the sun out here does not forgive anyone who talks about heaven without a hat. The Marrow Flats road runs sixty miles without a bend, and every driver who has ever taken it has passed a shrine on the wrong side of the tarmac. Mostly they are crosses of old fence wire, wrapped round with thorny vine, and mostly the families have pushed two paper roses into a jam jar at the foot of them.

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Dolores Quint drove that route for thirty-one years. She knew every shrine by name, and the one at Cutter's Well she knew best, because a man called Hollis Tay had built it for his brother, who went under a lorry on a wet morning. Hollis nailed a board to the cross and painted on it: If heaven wasn't so far away... He never finished the sentence, and Dolores never once stopped to finish it for him. She just watched the swallows drop low over the scrub whenever the dust came rolling in grey as a cloud bank.

One August a boy climbed on at the petrol station with a guitar case and a ticket to nowhere in particular. He saw her slow for Cutter's Well and asked what she was looking for. She said she was counting birds. He said there were none. So she stopped the bus, and the two of them stood in the heat while the jam jar roses turned out to be fresh, red as a split lip, which meant somebody had been out there that morning. Nobody had. The boy lifted his face and watched the swallows go straight up into a sky with no clouds in it at all.

He said, quite plainly, that heaven didn't seem so far after all. Dolores had been wrong about a great many things in thirty-one years, and she found she could not argue with the roses.