Fine line tattoo of a cross formed from looping strands with scroll ends, placed on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Looped cross on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A cross made of looping, ribbon-like strands with curled scroll ends sits centrally on the upper back of a person with pale skin. The linework is fine and even, with soft shading along the edges of the strands. The ink reads as a dark, muted tone against the warm, reddish lighting of the photograph.

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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

Sit down, the lot of you, and stop pretending you can't hear the wind. Old Brother Osric used to say a cross should have an end to it, and he was wrong, because the one carved over the north cloister door has none. You've all walked under it. Look up next time and you'll see the ribbon go round itself four times and never tie off.

Keep reading

Thirty winters back, when the binding room flooded, the abbey lost the Gospel of the Fens, and Sister Wenna, the only woman allowed past the gate after compline, sat on the wet flagstones with the broken spine in her lap. She had a length of undyed linen thread and a needle no longer than my finger. She did not sew the book shut. She looped the thread through the old holes in a figure the brothers would argue over for a year, crossing it at the heart and curling the tails into scrolls, the way parchment curls when it has been left too long in the damp.

The prior wanted it unpicked. Wenna said the thread was for holding, not for pulling tight, and that a cross made only of loops can always be walked back to where it started. So it stayed. When the book was rebound, those strands held the pages together as faithfully as any cord, and when I asked her where the knot was, she laughed and said there was never one. You don't find the beginning of it by looking for a knot. You find it by following the curl.

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