Shaded grey cross with a heart-shaped outline and three red rosebuds on a stem, tattooed on skin.

Grey cross with heart and red roses

Traditional · Mixed · Photo

A grey-shaded cross has a heart-shaped outline woven through its upper arms, with the heart shape formed by the cross's own outline. Three red rosebuds with green-grey stems and leaves run down the lower shaft. The shading is soft and smooth on the cross, and the roses are filled in colour, with the photograph taken straight on and the skin filling the frame.

Traditional Cross Heart Rose Rosebud Stem Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Win, the rain has finally come off the tips, so the whole row smells of wet slate and Sunday cabbage. Mr Pryce the joiner finished the new lychgate at St Brynach's on Thursday, and you'll laugh at what he did with the cross on top. He wouldn't cut a plain one. He said a cross wants something to hold it up, so he ran a heart through the arms, one line doing both jobs, so that when you stand underneath, the heart and the cross seem to come out of the same wood. Father Hughes called it clever and not quite proper, and Pryce just grinned and went on with his sanding.

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Dad came up from the fourth shift grey to the eyebrows, and he stood at the gate a long while before he came in. I didn't ask what he'd been looking at. Tom is on the back shift this month and asked me to put roses in the window box, which I thought was soft of him until I saw he'd nicked the cuttings off Mrs Evans's wall without asking. Three buds, red as the wagon paint, on one stem. I told him they were the three of us. He said no, Mam, they're the three of you lot who never stop talking.

Here's the thing I meant to tell you. Pryce brought round the offcut from the lychgate, a curl of oak shaped like a heart, and said it was for the woman who'd fed him for thirty years and never once complained about the sawdust on her floor. I've put it on the mantel beside the clock. It doesn't weigh anything, but it's the first thing in this house I'd go back in for if the chimney caught.

Come home at Easter if the trains are running. Bring the good tea and don't let the conductor talk you into the second class. Your loving sister, Nell.