Colour tattoo of an ornate jewelled cross in gold, blue and red tones on the upper arm, in a traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Jewelled cross on an upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A large ornate cross with a gold outline, blue inlay and red and green oval gems set into its arms and centre. Bold black outlines and smooth colour fills give it a stained-glass or jewelled appearance. The cross sits centrally on the upper arm against plain skin, photographed straight on.

Traditional Upper arm Cross Gemstone Jewel

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The glazier of Hollin Wick had three daughters and one good cross, a gold-edged thing with blue glass laid into its arms, and it hung above the font where the whole parish could see it. When the second daughter, Tamsin, agreed to marry the miller's son, her father took it down the morning of the wedding and wrapped it in a cloth that smelled of linseed. He said it was a gift. He did not say it had been promised to the chapel by his own mother.

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Ruel, the miller's son, had walked the lane to the chapel that morning to ask why the cross was in a sack by the door. The glazier told him the centre stone had cracked in the frost and would need to be set again, and that Tamsin wanted it done before the feast. The green oval in the middle was gone. Ruel knew the mill race ran past the old weir, where the water had worn a hollow in the gravel over forty winters, and that anything dropped from the bridge would roll there and stay.

He found it wedged under a root the size of a plough beam, the green glass cold and whole. He carried it home in his mouth because his hands were full of wet stones. Tamsin set it back into the cross herself at the long table, with the candles going down and the fiddler asleep in his chair, and no one could say afterwards where the glue had come from.

The cross went back on the chapel wall the following spring, and the glazier never asked for it again. The window above the font stayed blank for a year after, and nobody in Hollin Wick asked why the light came in so plain.