Two women seen from behind on a beach, each with a small black cross tattoo on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching cross tattoos on two backs at the beach

Back · Black and grey · Photo

Two women stand side by side with their backs to the camera, each with a small, simple black cross tattooed on the upper back between the shoulder blades. The crosses have solid, even black lines with no visible shading. The background is turquoise sea, a pale horizon and a blue sky with soft clouds, and the skin shows sunlight and droplets of water.

Back Cross Beach Sea Sky Bikini

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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 Calder ferry was late again, so Marnie and Jo sat on the slipway with their backs to the town and waited for the sea to make up its mind. Jo had a biro in one fist and a page torn from a Ladybird spelling book in the other, and she was writing the terms out in capitals, the way their dad wrote invoices. One cross each, the same height as a thumb. Ink, not biro, because biro was for lists. Jo had nicked a bottle of Indian ink from the boatyard, and they had agreed, without quite saying it, that whoever went first would also be the one who was brave about it.

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Marnie went first. The boatyard man, Mr Pardoe, held the bottle steady and told them both to stop wriggling, and the needle-tipped pen he lent them stung in a way neither of them admitted to. Afterwards they walked the length of the harbour wall with their shoulders aching and their shirts stuck to them, pretending they were not proud of themselves. The ferry came in that evening with its horn going, and nobody on it looked twice at two girls with the same small black mark.

Thirty years on the biro on the spelling page had faded to nothing, but the ink had not. Jo rang from a rig off Aberdeen to say she was coming home for the summer, and Marnie met her off the same boat, late again, on the same slipway. The sea was running flat and bright. Neither of them mentioned the terms. They just sat down with their backs to the town, and the tide came in over the old page Jo had dropped between the stones, and the paper went soft and grey and was gone, and the two crosses kept on matching in the sun.