Black fine line tattoo of an ornate cross with scrolled and heart-shaped ends, placed on the back of the neck.

Ornate scrolled cross on the back of the neck

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A single ornate cross with curling scroll details and heart-shaped terminals at the ends of each arm. The outline is drawn in a fine, even black line, with the inner band of the cross left as unshaded skin. The cross sits centrally on the back of a neck against a plain skin background, with some hair visible at the top of the frame.

Fine line Neck Cross Scrollwork Heart Ornament

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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

The iron cross hung on a nail above the bread oven in Hollin Dale, and nobody in the village would take it down, though it had come from the forest and the forest had never given anything back without a price. Your grandmother told you that. She told you the scrolls were vines that had grown around a bell the old monks buried, and that each curl was a promise somebody had made and broken. You thought it was the kind of story adults told to keep children from the trees.

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The spring you turned fourteen, the bread stopped rising. Flour went grey and sour in the bin, and the miller's boy swore he heard singing under the roots of the oak past the stile. You took the cross down in the dark, wrapped it in your mother's blue shawl, and walked the path between the hazels until the lanterns of the village were gone behind you. The heart-shaped ends caught the moonlight like small bells that had forgotten how to ring.

At the clearing you found a stone with a hollow in its top the exact width of the cross's long arm. You pressed it in. The earth made a sound like a held breath let out, and the roots beneath the oak loosened and curled back, one loop after another, until a door of root-tangle stood open. Inside, a woman with flour on her hands was kneading dough on a table that had no legs. She looked up at you, and then at the cross, and laughed. The bread, she said, had only ever wanted to be carried home by someone who came back for it.

You walked out with a loaf still warm in the shawl, and when you reached the stile the cross was back on its nail above the oven, and your grandmother was already slicing the bread without asking where you had been.