Black line drawing of an outlined cross surrounded by curling scrolls and flowing lines, shown as a tattoo design on plain white with no body placement.

Cross with swirling scroll design

Black and grey · Flash

A bold outlined Latin cross sits at the centre of the drawing, with thinner flowing lines and spiral scrolls wrapping around its arms and extending beyond the edges. The linework is solid black on a white background with no shading, and the cross is left unfilled. The composition is vertical and balanced, with the scrolls extending upward and to the lower right.

Cross Scroll Swirl Line art Spiral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bell in Hallam Cross had been silent since the frost took the tower, and Maud Tennant climbed the ladder every Sunday with a tin of linseed oil and a rag, though nobody had asked her to. The village had stopped expecting anything of the church. The vicar had gone to live with his sister in Harrogate, and the lane to the churchyard was full of nettles that reached for her skirts like something wanting to be let in.

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On the third Sunday in March she found a boy sitting on the lychgate with a paper bag of boiled sweets. He was perhaps nine, and he told her his name was Ewan and that his grandfather had cut the stone cross that stood at the head of the old lane, the one with the scrolls carved round its arms like smoke off a candle. Ewan said the stone had a crack through its middle and that the grandfather had promised to mend it before the winter took him. He had not. The boy wanted to know if Maud could mend things.

She said she could mend oil lamps and hinges, and the boy looked so let down that she laughed, which surprised them both. They walked down together to look. The cross lay face-down in the bracken where it had tumbled, its arms split clean, the curled ornaments underneath still sharp enough to catch the light.

They carried the two halves back up the hill between them, the boy pushing and Maud steering, and when they set the stone upright against the wall it stood a little crooked, its scrolls flung out wide towards the lower road. Maud pressed her palm flat against the seam. It was cold, and then, slowly, it was not, and the boy said nothing at all, only handed her a sweet.