Black and grey ornate cross tattoo with filigree detailing on the inner wrist, beside a metal chain bracelet.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate cross tattoo on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small cross tattoo sits on the inner wrist, with a decorative filigree pattern of scrolls and floral motifs running along its arms and shaft. The linework is fine and dark, with light shading that gives the cross some depth. The ink is black and grey, and the cross is placed off-centre on the skin with metal chains and beads in the foreground.

Fine line Forearm Cross Filigree Floral pattern Ornament

Find an artist for this

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 thaw came late to Hallow Pass that year, and the innkeeper's daughter, Tamsin Vell, counted the days by the icicles on the eaves. Her father had gone over the ridge with the mules in October and had not come back, and the snow had closed the road behind him like a lid. Travellers still came, a few, because the inn had the only hearth for nine miles, and they paid in coin or in silver spoons or in promises.

Keep reading

One evening a stranger came up the track with a dog that would not lie down and a bundle of iron chain over one shoulder. He asked for a bed and nothing else, and Tamsin gave him the room above the stable where the warmth from the horses rose through the boards. In the morning she found the chain laid out across the kitchen flags in a neat coil, and beside it a small cross of old brass, its arms worked all over with scrolls and little flowers, the way the frost works a windowpane. The stranger was gone. The dog was gone. The snow outside had no tracks in it at all.

She hung the cross above the hearth, where the smoke could not reach it, and for a week she told nobody. Then the road opened on a Tuesday, and her father walked down it with the mules behind him, thin as a rake and grinning like a boy. He had lost the trail in a whiteout, he said, and had sheltered under a rock with a grey man who sang to keep them both awake. Tamsin asked him what the man had looked like. He said he could not remember, only that the fellow had worn a chain on his wrist and had asked nothing for his company.

That spring Tamsin took the brass cross down and wore it on a cord under her collar, and when the bad weather came over the pass again she went out to the drifts with a lantern and a bell, and she always came back.