Black and grey tattoo of a looping cross with swirled ends on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Looped cross tattoo on the side ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a cross formed from interlocking ribbon-like loops, with small spiral curls at the ends of the arms. The linework is bold and dark, with grey shading that gives the loops some depth. It is in black and grey only and sits across the side of the torso, with the rest of the composition cropped to the skin.

Ribs Cross Celtic knot Loop Swirl Infinity

Find an artist for this

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 path into Brackenhurst Wood closes itself every October, and by the time you are nine you have learned to watch for it. Your grandmother, who keeps the bees and the iron gate at the lane's end, hands you a hank of undyed grey wool and tells you to fetch the ribbon back before the first frost. You do not ask what ribbon. You ask which way the wind is blowing instead, because the old hands say the wood listens from the windward side.

Keep reading

Past the third oak the wool begins to loop itself. You tie a loop, and the next one ties itself through it, and the thread runs on in a figure of eight until you cannot tell where your fingers stop. At the crossing you find the cross: four arms, each one looping over and under the last, and at the end of each arm a small curl like a fiddlehead fern. It is cold, and it is not waiting for you. It is only what the wood has made of the path, the way a knot is what a rope remembers.

You kneel and trace the loops with your thumb. A blackbird in the holly watches you without interest. The trick, your grandmother said, is to find the free end. Every knot has one, and once you pull it the whole thing comes undone, the way a promise does. You search for twenty minutes with your hands going numb, following the grey thread through loop after loop, and you are sure you are close when the ribbon goes on forever in both directions.

So you stop searching. You tie your own half-hitch onto the nearest arm and hold the spare wool up to the light. It is the first thing you have ever made that nobody else could undo. Walking home, you do not look back, but you hear the wind change behind you, and when the frost comes down that night the cross holds its shape in the dark, looped and endless, with your small knot tied somewhere in the middle of it.