Sheet of fourteen black and grey cross designs in varied shapes, including a fleury cross, a crown cross and a cross with a flame.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Grid of cross designs in black and grey

Black and grey · Flash

A grid of fourteen cross designs drawn in solid black and grey, with some outlined, some filled and some shaded to look three-dimensional. The shapes range from simple plain crosses to ornate, flared and pointed forms, and a few include a crown or a flame. The designs sit on a plain white background in an even arrangement, arranged like a flash sheet.

Cross Crown Flame

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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

Tuesday, 14 January. Frost on the yard again, so the banker stayed under its sheet and I spent the morning at the bench with Mr Garside's pattern sheet, the one pinned above the stove with grease marks on it. Fourteen crosses in pencil and ink, a sheet he bought off a travelling engraver in 1962 and has never trusted to anyone else's hand. He says a cross is the easiest thing in the world to get wrong, because everyone thinks they know one.

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He sent me to copy the flared one on the second row, the one with the little cusps like buds at each arm. I drew it four times before he was satisfied. The fifth went onto the Hebden slab, and Mrs Hebden stood at the gate in her husband's coat and watched me chisel it, not speaking, until the light went. She asked if I could do the crown one as well, the one with the thorns like a cardboard tiara. I said that wasn't ours to cut. Garside said it was ours if she paid for it, which made her cry, and I wasn't sure whether that was the sheet's fault or mine.

Last thing before dark, Garside took a pencil and shaded the grey cross in the bottom row, the one with the flame curling round its foot, so it stood up off the paper. He said that was the trick: you never make a thing flat, you make the light sit on one side of it. Then he wiped his hands on his trousers and went home without saying goodnight, which is how I know he meant it as the lesson.