Black ink tattoo of an ornate cross with scrolled arms and small dots, on pale skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate scrolled cross tattoo

Black and grey · Photo

A black ink cross with a long vertical stem and scrolled, curling terminals at each arm, ending in small dots. The inner section has a woven, lattice-like pattern where the arms meet. The linework is uniform and smooth against a plain background of skin, with the design filling most of the frame.

Cross Scrollwork Dot Lattice

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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 wrought iron is still warm when the man at the lay-by hands it to you, and the scrolls at the end of each arm have not yet cooled to black. He says it is for the church at the far end of the valley, that the priest there lost his cross in a dust storm and will pay you in tins of peaches and a bed for the night. You wrap it in a feed sack and tie the bundle to the rack of your truck with baling twine, because the road ahead is forty miles of nothing and the sky already looks like it has been left out in the sun too long.

Keep reading

Somewhere past the second cattle grid the twine snaps. You stop, climb onto the flatbed, and find the cross lying in a bed of gravel, its lattice centre cracked clean through where the arms meet. The little iron dots at the tips have held. You sit with it in your lap and count them, nine in all, the way your grandmother counted rosary beads when she thought nobody was listening.

Dusk comes down the road ahead of the wind. You weld the break with a borrowed gas bottle and torch, working by the headlights, sparks going up like a flock of small birds. When you finish, the join is a bright seam running through the knot of the lattice, and it looks less like a repair than a thing that was always meant to carry a mark there.

At the church the priest turns it over in his hands for a long time. Then he hangs it above the door, facing the road, where anyone driving in can see it from the last bend.