Black and grey pencil drawing of a cross with two ribbon banners wrapped around its arms and shaft, shaded for a tattoo design.

Cross with two wrapped ribbon banners

Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows an ornate cross with flared, pointed arms, with two blank ribbon banners wrapped around the upper and central sections. The forms are shaded with fine hatching and cross-hatching that gives the metal-like cross and folded ribbons a three-dimensional look. The image is monochrome on a plain white background, with a small stencil-style marking to the lower right.

Cross Ribbon Banner

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cross had been on the bench since Lent, and Mr Pryce still would not let me near the ribbons. 'Those belong to whoever has to fill them,' he said, wiping his hands down his apron. 'Iron doesn't mind what it carries. People do.' I took that to mean the banners would stay blank until somebody told him what to write, and I went back to my file.

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The arms came out of a bar cut from an old mill gate in Dudley, heated until it went the colour of wet brick and then beaten flat at the ends so the points flared like the blades of a spade. The ribbons were harder. We folded them cold, hammer and bottom fuller, so each curl kept its shape and the edges turned up as if a breeze had caught them. Every Thursday Mrs Haworth came down the lane with a flask of sweet tea and stood in the doorway, looking at the cross sideways, never straight on.

On the last Thursday before the frost she set the flask down and said she had changed her mind about the names. 'Leave them empty,' she said. 'Let it be for whoever comes up that path next, and doesn't yet know what they'll need to say.' Mr Pryce looked at me, then at her, and for once he had no line ready. We set the cross into the stone pier by the lychgate that week, the flared arms level with my shoulder.

I went back after the rain. The metal had gone cold and dark, and water had collected in the folds of the ribbons, two thin bowls of sky lying along the iron. Nobody had written anything on them. I stood there a while with my cap in my hand, reading nothing, and found I didn't mind.