Black fine line tattoo of an ornate cross with scrolling filigree on the inner wrist of a person holding a hand.

Ornate cross on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black ornate cross with swirling, scrolled filigree sits on the inner wrist, with curls extending from the crossbar and upright. The linework is solid and even, and the design is shown in black ink with no shading or colour. The photo is taken at close range, with the wrist centred and a hand and bare legs in soft focus around it.

Fine line Forearm Cross Scrollwork Filigree Wrist

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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 cross came out of the nettles behind the old chapel wall in March, bent at the foot where a sycamore had leaned on it for fifty years. Mr Ashdown wanted it carted off before the new glasshouse went up, but I asked to keep it, and he shrugged and said the garden was mine to muddle.

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Wrought iron that was hammered by hand has a grain that machines never learn. I scraped the rust back with a wire brush and found the scrolls had been drawn out one curl at a time, each tip beaten thin and turned over like a fern unrolling. Somebody had stood at an anvil in a cold shed and made the curls match on both sides, which takes a patience I have never managed with anything but seed trays.

I spent three weeks on it. Linseed oil, a file, a bed of gravel in the sun. The crossbar wanted straightening, so I heated it over the paraffin burner in the potting shed and tapped it true with my father's old mallet. On the last evening I found an initial stamped into the back of the upright, worn almost smooth, and I could not read it until I tilted it toward the low light.

It was a B, and beneath it a date, 1931, and beneath that the smallest curl I had ever seen, no bigger than a thumbprint. I fixed the cross to the south wall of the walled garden, where the first roses would climb, and left the tip of the lowest scroll free so the honeysuckle could find its own way round.