Black and grey ornate cross tattoo with filigree detailing centred on the upper back of a woman with her hair in a bun.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate cross on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a woman's upper back, with her hair tied in a loose bun and a light sleeveless top. A detailed cross with scrolled, filigree-style arms and small floral or ornamental terminals sits centrally between the shoulder blades. The linework and shading are fine and even against the skin, and the dark background frames the tattoo closely.

Back Cross Filigree Ornament Floral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mercy Pell had wire between her teeth the morning the bishop's man came up the Penryn road asking for the silversmith who could make a cross with no straight line in it. She spat the end into her apron, told him the shop was hers and not her father's, and said curves cost double.

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He paid it. Three weeks later he came back with a drawing on the back of a tithe receipt: a Latin cross whose arms opened into scrolls like ferns uncurling, each terminal a five-petalled flower no bigger than a barleycorn. The design had belonged to a nun in Bruges, he said, and her original had been melted in a chapel fire. Mercy understood then that she would be making the thing from a memory of a memory.

She drew the scrolls with a horsehair brush and a pot of pitch, then pulled the silver through the draw plate until it was thread-thin. Each curl cost her a whole evening. She soldered the flowers from wire so fine the flame had to be breathed upon, and when the last one was set her eyes ached and the candle had burnt to a stub. She held the cross to the window and saw that every arm bent very slightly towards the light.

The bishop's man never collected it. A year later a boy with a handcart brought back a small oilcloth parcel with a note that said only: it was never meant for the altar. Mercy unwrapped it on the bench and found the cross, dull with handling, and beside it a child's bent pin, the kind used to fasten a collar. She hung the cross in the shop window, and when a girl pressed her nose to the glass and asked what it was for, Mercy said it was for catching the light, and that the light found its way through in the end.