Black ink flash design of an ornate cross decorated with cut-out motifs and bold swirls, shown on a plain white background.

Ornate cross with swirling scrollwork

Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical cross sits at the centre of the design, with its arms and upright filled with cut-out rounded shapes, dots and small quatrefoil motifs. Thick black swirls and curling scrolls wrap around the cross and extend into the empty white space. The image is a solid black silhouette with no shading or greys, and it has no body placement shown.

Cross Swirl Scrollwork Ornament Flourish

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gate was hung by Candlemas, but Samuel Thwaite would not let the blacksmith's boy paint the crosses until he had punched every hole himself. Eleven hundred and twelve of them: rounds and squares, and the little four-petalled flowers his wife had liked. His daughter Ada counted them aloud from the bench while the forge ticked down, and when she lost her place he made her start again from the top of the upright.

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The churchwarden paid in silver on the Friday and remarked that the crosses looked like lace. Samuel said lace was only cloth that had been talked out of its holes. He did not mention that the big curling tails had come to him in a dream of the sea, or that he had drawn them wide so the crosses would not sink into the grey air of the churchyard. He did not mention that his hands had stopped shaking only once the chisel was in them.

Ada left for Leeds at eighteen to work the looms, and she did not come back for nearly thirty years. When she did, the iron had gone the colour of old pennies at the hinges, and the lych gate had worn a smooth dip where the coffins rested. Someone had kept the paint fresh on the upright cross, the one with the most holes.

She stood on the path at Easter with her gloves on and traced the quatrefoils with one finger until the rain got through the wool. Through every hole the morning light fell onto the flagstones in small bright coins, and she stood among them until the bell rang for the service.