Black and grey traditional style tattoo of a cross with a ribbon wrapped around it, on the inner forearm of a person in a white top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cross with ribbon on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large cross with pointed, flared ends sits upright on the forearm, with a ribbon coiling around its shaft and a trailing tail at the bottom. The cross is outlined in bold black lines and shaded in soft grey tones, giving the ribbon a rounded, dimensional look. The design fills the centre of the frame against a plain skin tone, with a blurred chair and wooden floor in the background.

Traditional Forearm Cross Ribbon Banner

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ribbon was the trouble, not the cross. Anyone can rule a cross, Mr Pryce said, pointing his brush at the board, but a ribbon has to look as if it has somewhere to be. Rowan had worked at the sign shop on Tanner Street since he was fourteen, and he had painted nine shopfronts and a hearse's name before anyone let him near the gold leaf for a church banner.

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The commission came from St Idris, where the vicar wanted a processional cross for Whitsun, its arms flared like the ends of a wrought gate. Rowan drew it out in pencil three times. Each time the ribbon coiled up the shaft and then went flat as wet paper. On the third night he sat with the lamp turned low and let the cross fade into the dark, working only at the ribbon, lifting each loop with grey wash so it swelled out from the wood and seemed to turn its back on him.

On the Friday the vicar came in with his hat in his hands and asked whether it would hold in the wind. Rowan said it would. He did not say that he had stopped seeing the ribbon as paint and started seeing it as something tied around the wood by someone who meant to come back for it.

The banner went up at Whitsun. Nobody remarked on the ribbon, which Rowan took as a compliment, and its tail hung straight down from the foot of the cross, heavy and grey, as though someone had weighted it with lead.