Black ink tattoo of an ornate cross with scrolled filigree details, placed centrally on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate cross on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of a large ornate cross tattooed centrally on the upper back, with the top of the shoulder blades visible. The cross has a thick outline with curled scroll details at each arm end, and the interior is filled with soft grey shading that gives it some depth. The tattoo is shown in black and grey against a plain skin background, with the subject's hair visible at the top of the frame.

Back Cross Scrollwork Filigree

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The finial had come down in the February gale, and by the third morning Ada Quarrie had the broken arm of it laid across her bench, the rust flaking under her thumb like old pastry. The churchwarden wanted a copy by Easter. He wanted it exact, he said, down to the last curl, because the congregation would notice a wrong scroll before they noticed a missing cross.

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She worked from the fragment and from the lychgate cross, which her grandfather had always called the Ferrow piece. Its scrolls were tighter than any she had seen in the county, each one turning back on itself twice before it let go. She had always taken them for flourish. Standing beneath the gate with a lamp and a pencil, she saw that the turns were not all alike. Some opened to the left, some to the right, and some stopped short, leaving a gap no wider than a fingernail.

Her grandfather had taught her that the old smiths wrote in their ironwork when they were not allowed to write anywhere else. She copied the sequence onto squared paper, counting turns, and by the next dusk she had a name: TOBIAS, then a date in 1788, then FERROW, spelt out in curls a child would take for vines. A boy, then, drowned in the millrace, and a mother with money and no other way to say so in a parish that would not let her carve it on a stone.

Ada heated the bar until it glowed the colour of a robin's breast and drew out the first scroll. She made every turn the way the old hand had made it, all but one. On the last curl of the lower arm she left the gap open, so that anyone who looked closely would see something unfinished there, and might ask.