Black and grey gothic cross tattoo with an outlined, shaded fill on the back of a neck, with brown hair visible above it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Gothic cross on the back of the neck

Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A single cross with pointed, flared arms sits centrally on the back of a neck. The cross has a dark, solid grey-black fill with a lighter grey outline and a soft shadow along its edges. The plain pale skin and loose hair around it leave the tattoo as the clear focus of the frame.

Neck Cross

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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

Now you'll want to sit down for this, because the iron doesn't forgive a man who talks while he hammers. My uncle Walter had the forge behind the Methodist chapel on Kettering Lane, and in the spring of 1953 the vicar brought him a drawing of a cross with arms that flared out like the bell of a trumpet and points at every end sharp enough to draw blood. He wanted it for the lych gate, black and heavy, to hang over the path where the coffins came through.

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Walter made it over nine days. He beat the arms flat, then folded the edges back on themselves so the outline stood proud of the centre, and he rubbed soot into the hollow of the middle so it would never shine. Old Mrs Pryce from the almshouses brought him tea every afternoon and sat on an upturned bucket, telling him the cross was too grim for a gate that children ran through. Walter said grim was the point. Grim was what the dead needed from the living, a plain black thing that told you where you stood.

On the tenth morning the gate was hung, and the vicar came out in his cassock to bless it. Nobody saw the farm boy climb up to touch the top arm, not until he came down with iron dust on his palms and a grin that made his mother cross herself. He said the cross was warm. It was a cold day, mind you, and the iron had been in the frost all night.