Small black and grey ornate cross tattoo on the upper back of a woman with her hair up, with a close-up of the same cross on skin beside it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate cross on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

The main photograph shows a small ornate cross tattoo centred on the upper back, just below the nape, on a woman with blonde hair in a loose bun and a low-cut top. A close-up in the lower right shows the cross in more detail, with a bold outline, filigreed arms and inner panels in black ink with grey shading. A smaller image in the upper right shows a gloved hand working on the tattoo, and the composition is a three-panel collage.

Back Cross

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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 reunion is in the sports hall of St Aldric's, where the basketball hoops have been folded up against the wall like sleeping bats. You stand by the trestle of paper cups and read the name badges. Someone has written Maggie Quayle in capitals, and under it, in biro, is the line 'still owes me a tenner'. You have not seen Maggie since the Lent term of 1998, when she left the choir stalls in tears and the rumour followed her out of the chapel gate.

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She is at the far table cutting a Victoria sponge with a bread knife borrowed from the kitchen. Round her neck hangs the same fine chain, and on it the same small cross the school gave out for confirmation, its arms filigreed and dulled where the metal has rubbed against a lifetime of collars. You remember the vestry where you both hid during Evensong, the hymn books smelling of damp, and the brass key on its hook above the vicar's sink that nobody was ever supposed to touch.

"You never came back for the key," she says, sliding a slice across to you on a paper napkin. "Mr Hartley changed every lock in the place the spring after you left." You tell her you assumed it had gone with the rest of the lost property. She laughs and fishes in her cardigan pocket, and there it is, cold and heavier than you remember, its teeth still bright.

You turn it over in your palm while the caretaker starts stacking chairs behind you. Twenty-six years, and it still fits nothing you can name, yet you cannot put it down. Across the hall the lights go out one bank at a time, and Maggie is the last one still standing in the glow, waiting to see whether you will walk the corridor with her.