Photograph of an ornate cross tattoo with a solid blue centre and black filigree scrollwork outline, placed on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate cross on upper back

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A large cross with a solid blue fill sits at the centre of the frame, outlined in black with ornate filigree scrollwork curling around each arm. The linework is bold and even, and the blue shading is smooth and fairly flat. The tattoo is centred on the skin with plain, dark background behind the subject.

Back Cross Scrollwork Filigree

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gate had to be finished before the snow, because the pass closed in October whether or not the work was ready. My uncle's hands had started to shake over the anvil that autumn, so the scrollwork fell to me. I was nineteen and I hammered each curl out of the red bar twice, once to shape it and once to be sure the cold had not got into my wrists.

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The chapel of Sant Ferran sat across the line itself, its nave on one side of the boundary stones and its altar on the other. Nobody argued about the gate, which would stand at the lych path where pilgrims crossed, its crown a cross with plain arms I left for the painter. Father Anselm, who kept the sacristy and ground his own lapis from the valley, asked for the centre to be blue. The customs men on the north side wanted white and those on the south wanted nothing at all, so blue was the only compromise he could find.

I watched him paint it in the last week of September, his brush moving slowly along the bars while snow blew across the lamp. When he finished he sat back on his heels and said the iron would hold the colour longer than the colour would hold the iron, which I did not understand until I was older and came up the pass each autumn myself with a tool roll to mend other people's gates.

On the morning the gate was hung, two guards from either side stood with their hands in their pockets and watched it swing shut behind the last mule. Neither of them stepped forward to stop it, and neither moved to open it. The sun came through the scrollwork and laid a web of shadows across the snow on both sides at once, and for a moment the blue cross lay over the boundary like something that belonged to nobody and to everybody.