Greyscale pencil drawing of a rough wooden cross bound with rope, presented as a tattoo design with no body part shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lashed wooden cross design

Black and grey · Flash

A shaded pencil drawing of a rough, weathered wooden cross, made from two lengths of timber bound together with twine or rope in the centre. The bark and wood grain are rendered with light and dark strokes, with dripping-style marks along the edges, and loose rope ends trail from the lashing. The design is drawn in black and grey on a plain white background with the cross filling the frame.

Cross Rope Wood Bark

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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

The nails ran out the week the Sallow Dyke froze, so Tomas Aske lashed the crossbar to the upright with tarred hemp, using the knot his father had taught him, the one that holds all winter and gives way to a single tug.

Keep reading

He had cut both lengths from the drowned willow at the sluice, grey and split along the grain, and he left the bark on because Wil Corder had been a man who liked things rough. The widow Hesketh watched from the bank with her shawl pulled tight. When he finished, a few loose ends of rope hung from the lashing, and she told him to leave them, since a thing that could be untied could still be put to use.

Nine winters passed. The tar cracked and the hemp greyed to the colour of old string. The wood silvered and wormed, and the bark came away in long curls that the wind carried over the reed beds. Children dared each other to touch the cross, then ran off shrieking when the ends swung at their faces.

One March the widow Hesketh came down with a knife, but she never used it. She worked the knot loose with her thumbs, slow as reading, and carried the crossbar home under one arm. She set it across two stones by her door, where it has been a bench ever since, and she mends her nets there each evening with the loose ends of rope curling at her feet.