Solid black ornate cross design with looped knotwork ends and scrollwork on a white background, with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate black cross design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A solid black cross with a central circular boss, flared arms and looped knot-style terminals at each end. Fleur-like scrolls and tapering leaf shapes fill the lower arm and the sides of the upper arm. The design is flat black on white, with no shading or grey tones.

Blackwork Cross Knotwork Scrollwork Filigree

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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 lift to the chapel stuck again at ten past two, between the second and third floors, so I took the back stairs with the spare key swinging on its string. Nobody else on nights would have bothered. Ward clerks don't go near the chapel after midnight, and the chaplain has been retired since the spring, but Sister Dunne had asked me to check the altar candles before the four o'clock bloods, and I have never once refused her anything.

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The cross stood on the sideboard where they keep the hymn books. It was iron, black as a stove, its arms flaring out into knotted loops at every tip, the centre boss polished bright by a century of thumbs. Someone had pinned a paper poppy to one of the scrolls. Lower down, the leaves tapered like a fern pressed too long in a book. I counted the loops twice, out of habit, the way I count drips and drains.

Behind it, pushed into the gap between the panelling and the wall, I found a folded letter addressed to nobody: For whoever keeps the light on. The ink had gone brown, but the hand was careful. It asked that the cross be kept where the morning sun could reach it, because the smith who made it, a man called Aldous Pell, had made it for a window bricked up in 1931. It went on about the knots, how a loop has no end, so a person can always find their way back into it.

I put the letter back exactly where I found it. Then I lit the candles, turned the cross a few degrees so the lamp caught the boss, and went back down the stairs, leaving the lift to sort itself out.