Black and grey realism tattoo on a man's upper arm and shoulder showing a hooded winged figure with a halo, holding a cross, with script lettering below.

Hooded angel with cross on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A hooded, winged figure with a halo holds a large cross at the centre of the design, with a bright halo behind the head and feathered wings spreading on either side. Smooth shading and fine detail give the face, drapery and feathers a photorealistic finish, and lines of cursive script run down the arm beside the figure, with a circular emblem at the lower edge. The piece is rendered entirely in black and grey ink and fills the upper arm and shoulder, with a soft blurred background behind the subject.

Realism Upper arm Shoulder Angel Halo Wing Cross Hooded figure Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, it's worn in the middle the way my knees are. You want the woman with the cross? Then sit, and don't interrupt me like the minister's boy does. Her name was Ina Gunn, though the children called her the Hooded Sister, for she never went out without the grey cowl up. She came ashore on Skerrin the winter the gale took the ferry, with a satchel and a driftwood cross as tall as her arm, and walked straight past the kirk to the old light, which had been dark nine years.

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The light kept a keeper's log, and the last hand in it was not hers. Pages of cursive leaning all one way like grass in wind, each entry ending on the same line about a lamp that must not go out. Ina read them aloud while she trimmed the wick. At the foot of every page sat a ring of iron-gall ink, a circle with a hard star inside, which the damp had never quite eaten.

The second winter, the boats stopped. A lad from the mainland rowed out in a skiff to fetch her off the rock, all bravado, and the sea took his oars and near took him. When the tide turned he was on the steps of the light with his hands raw and the cowl bending over him. She lit the lamp that night and propped the cross in the window.

The fishing boats came back the next spring, steering by a beam nobody had been paid to keep. When she died they found the log open at the last page, the cursive running off the margin, and one line in a hand that was not old at all: keep the light, and let the rest be mended. The lamp burns still. Pass me that tin, and mind you don't drop crumbs on the page.