Black ink geometric tattoo of diamonds, crosses and lattice outlines on an upper arm near the elbow, shown in black and white.

Geometric cross-stitch elbow tattoo

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo covers the arm with a symmetrical geometric design built from nested diamonds, cross motifs and a dense lattice pattern. Fine, even linework is used for the outlines, with the central area filled with a tighter grid of small crosses and squares. The photograph is in black and white against a dark background, and the composition centres the motif on the arm with a band of stitch-like pattern visible at the top edge.

Blackwork Geometric Upper arm Diamond Cross Lattice Geometric pattern

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Your aunt keeps the chart in a biscuit tin, pinned between two sheets of greaseproof paper, and she will not let you copy it at the kitchen table. You copy it anyway, at the back of the chapel hall, by the grey light that comes through the window in the afternoons. Diamonds inside diamonds, each corner marked with a cross, each cross marked with a smaller square where the thread turns back on itself.

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The men go down at six. Before they do, their wives stitch the pattern into the linings of the waistcoats, a lattice of small red crosses worked over the heart, so that if the roof comes in and the rescue men dig through the dark, the shape will say whose body it is. Your aunt says the pattern is older than the pit and the pit only borrowed it. You do not argue. Your fingers are raw from the needle and you have stitched thirty-one waistcoats since Michaelmas.

On the night the Coed Lwyd shaft flooded, you sat with the last one still on the frame. It belonged to Idris Vaughan, nineteen, who had asked for his initials worked small in the corner and then changed his mind at the door. You pulled the centre square tighter than the chart asked, a grid so dense it nearly closed, because it was the only thing in the valley you could make hold still.

They brought him up on the Thursday. His mother came to the hall with her coat buttoned to the neck and asked for the waistcoat back. She turned it over, found the centre with her thumb, and counted the crosses under her breath. Then she looked at you and said the stitching was tight enough to hold.