Traditional style tattoo of an ornate gold and green cross with scalloped edges and red flower details, placed on the outer lower leg.

Ornate gold cross on a lower leg

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

A symmetrical cross-shaped design with scalloped gold arms, dotted detailing and a horizontal band across the centre. Green leaf shapes and a small red and white flower sit at the middle, with scrolled linework above and below. Bold black outlines and heavy shading give the piece a solid, classic look against the skin.

Traditional Calf Cross Flower Leaf Scroll Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The third pattern had to be cut again because Harold had sanded the dots off the left arm, and nobody at Crowther's foundry wanted to explain that to Mr Brindle before the chapel gates went into the sand. Eleanor held the lamp steady while Walter drove the gouge into the lime wood, taking the scallops down until each curl turned back on itself like a bracken frond unrolling.

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"Leave the band," she said. "Brindle likes a band. Says it holds the thing together, like a bit of sense in a silly hat."

He had not thought about why the cross needed a strap across its middle until she said it, and then he could not stop seeing it: the iron bar that had once held the old lych gate shut, the one they had cut up for scrap in the spring. Between the arms he cut a small flower with five petals and a hollow centre, and beside it two leaves that dropped down to points, with scrolled stems curling above and below like the marks a child makes on a steamed window.

On the last evening the pattern went into the sand. Walter pressed it in with both thumbs, lifted it out clean, and found Eleanor had scratched her initials into the back of the cross where no one would look. He did not tell Brindle. The gates went up at Easter, gilt-brown in the lamplight, and every Sunday after he walked past them on his way to the tram and touched the top of the cross for luck, the way you would touch a door you had built yourself.