Black and grey ornate cross tattoo with scrollwork arms and a flower motif at the centre, shown on the back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate cross on the back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A single ornate cross sits centrally on bare skin, with scrolled, leaf-like arms and a flower motif at the centre. The cross is outlined in heavy black lines with grey shading that gives the scrollwork dimension. The plain skin around it keeps the cross as the clear focus of the frame.

Back Cross Flower Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the gravel, because this is about the wall at Hollin Cross and the gardener who would not let the roses climb it. You'll have seen the cross set into the stonework at the top of the orchard path. Iron, scrolled like bracken, with a rosette at its heart the size of a farthing. Old Mrs Pellow swore it was cast from a broken gate, and that the gate was broken by her own husband, who was a drunk and a liar but a fine hand with a forge.

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Her husband, Tobias, had promised the lord's daughter a garden that would outlast the house. She laughed at him over the wall. He planted roses and they died in a week, so he planted lilies, then foxgloves, and each one wilted the moment he turned his back. Somebody was pulling them up at night, he said. He sat up with a lantern for three nights and saw nothing but a grey heron and the moon.

On the fourth night the frost came early, and in the morning every bloom in the bed had turned to a little iron rosette, cold and black, sprouting from the soil with leaves like hammered scrolls. Tobias stood in the middle of them and wept, and that was how the lord's daughter found him, weeping over a garden made of metal. She took his hand, pressed a coin into it, and said, "Then keep it, and keep it honest."

So he did. The rosettes still come up in the orchard every hard winter, and nobody picks them. Mind your step on the path, and don't tread on the middle one.