Large black ornamental cross tattoo on a forearm, with gold and black beaded bracelets worn above the wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate cross tattoo on forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large cross tattoo sits on the forearm, its arms filled with flowing filigree and dotted scroll patterns. The ink is solid black with bold outlines, and the ornament stands out sharply against the skin. Gold and black beaded bracelets with small cross charms rest above the wrist against a grey towelled background.

Blackwork Forearm Cross Ornament Filigree Scroll Bracelet Bead

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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

Sit closer, you that came over on the morning boat, and mind the wet step by the pier. The smith of Skerra Mhor was called Ewan Caw, and he had hands like two spades and a temper like a gull over a chip shop. Every winter he made one cross for the chapel door, and every winter the minister said it was too fancy for a God who died plain. Ewan said the Lord had never had to pay for his own bread, so let him have a bit of lace.

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The year the Gillies boy went out with the Mary Ann and didn't come back, his mother came to the forge with a bag of coins and a drawing on the back of a fag packet. She wanted a cross for the machair, but not cut in stone, because stone holds the rain and she wanted something that would turn the wind. Ewan worked three weeks on it. He filled each arm with scrolls, dotted like the foam on a turning tide, and he beat the iron so thin that the light came through the gaps and lay on the grass in little pieces.

The storm that had been sitting off the Stacks for a month went round the island that Sunday instead of over it. The Mary Ann's sister boat, the Morag, came in at dusk with a young man aboard, cold and cursing, who had clung to an upturned hatch for two days and would not say how he had come to be holding it. The Gillies boy had been carried home at last, alive, and his mother said the cross had only done what she asked it to do.

Ewan never took payment for another cross. Some say he kept the drawing on the fag packet in his apron pocket until the day he died. Now, who wants the last of the tea?