Black and grey ornate cross tattoo with filigree scrollwork on the side of a person's ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate cross tattoo on the ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A tall ornate cross sits vertically on the side of the torso, with fleur-de-lis style terminals and curling filigree scrollwork along the arms and base. The linework is fine and the shading is soft grey, giving the design a raised, engraved appearance. The image is taken from the side with a hand lifting a dark top, and the background is a plain white door with a brass handle.

Ribs Cross Scrollwork Filigree

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had come early to Hollin Pass that year, and the carters were already talking about waiting it out at the inn below. Old Maud the smith did not wait. She had a cross to finish, and the abbey's man had paid in advance, so she worked the forge through the night with the bellows wheezing and her apprentice asleep against the coal sacks.

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She drew the arms long and thin, the way her father had taught her. Then she could not stop the scrolls from growing. They curled out from the stem like ferns on a damp wall, and at the foot she set a lily that spread wider than any abbot would want. The boy woke and asked why it was so fussy. Maud said a marker should be seen from a long way off, and that fine work throws more shadow.

They hauled it up to the summit on a sledge the next morning, and the storm met them halfway. By noon the road was gone under white. Snow caught in every curl and hollow of the iron and stayed there, so that the cross stood out grey against the cloud when nothing else did. A carter coming up from the valley saw the shape, turned his team by it, and kept the ruts beneath his wheels.

Maud scratched her name small under the base, where only the crows would ever read it. The abbot never asked who had made it. The carters did not care about the smith. They only knew that when the pass disappeared, there was still something standing above the drifts to steer them home.