Black and grey crucifixion tattoo with red accents on a shoulder and upper arm, showing a figure on a cross, a crown of thorns, birds and rows of crosses.

Crucifixion scene on upper arm

Realism · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

A large tattoo covers the shoulder and upper arm with a crucifixion scene, showing a figure on a cross beneath a crown of thorns and a small inscribed plaque. Crosses rise from a hillside, birds fly across the top, and skulls sit at the base, with soft grey shading and swirling clouds behind. Small areas of red appear on the cloth, the cord and the blood, while the rest of the work is in black and grey.

Realism Shoulder Upper arm Cross Bird Crosses Skull Hill Cloud Figure

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift in Carrick House had been dead since Tuesday, so I was on the stairs with a toolbag when I found the painter sitting on the twelfth-floor landing, back to the wall, flask between his knees. He had been up there a fortnight, hired by the residents' association to cover the damp patch behind the fire door. The patch had become a hill. Three crosses first, then a dozen, black against a grey sky, until the stairwell felt less like a stairwell and more like the ground after a battle nobody had bothered to name.

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"Who's the man on the middle one?" I asked. He didn't look up. "Nobody's man. Just a body that's been up there a long time." He unscrewed the flask and poured a cup that smelled of tea and something stronger. "Mrs Ruddock wanted the birds. Starlings, because they nest in her gutter and she says they're the only thing in this block that still turns up on time."

Mrs Ruddock came up at half four with a tin of red emulsion under her arm, which she said was the colour of the cord she meant, not the pale pink he'd used. She stood on the landing in her slippers and rubbed at the cloth on the cross with her thumb until the paint came away on her skin. "There," she said. "That's what it looks like when it's wet."

He painted it again while she watched, and I fitted the new fuse by the light from the window. When the lift finally came back on, it gave the old hum, and the three of us stood in the doorway listening, as if the building had been holding its breath for a fortnight and had just remembered how to breathe.