Fine line tattoo of a row of small black crosses encircling the inside of a wrist, with the hand raised against a plain brown background.

Row of small crosses around a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A hand is raised against a plain brown background, with a band of small black crosses running across the wrist. Each cross is drawn with thin, even lines of solid black ink, and they are spaced at regular intervals in a single row. The soft lighting and shallow focus keep attention on the tattoo, which is the only coloured-free detail in the frame.

Fine line Geometric Forearm Cross Crosses Band

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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 priest's ledger in Hollin Dyke listed nine crosses cut into the beech at the forest's edge, one for each child the river had taken since the mill was built. Old Marta swept the leaf-litter from them every spring with a birch broom, because that was what her mother had done and her mother's mother before that.

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The spring the tenth cross appeared, nobody had cut it. It was a thin black mark on the bark at the height of a wrist, neat as a stitch, and when Marta touched it the wood was warm. The miller's boy said the forest was paying a debt. The schoolmistress said it was damp and the bark had split. Marta said nothing, because she had counted the crosses every spring for forty years and knew that a tree does not keep a count unless someone asks it to.

She took a knife to the bark that evening and cut a small cross beside the new one, then another, then another, working along the trunk until the seventh was done and her hands ached. In the morning the crosses were gone from the beech and the leaves had come down over the path like a dropped shawl. The mill boy came up the track whistling, lifted his cap to her, and went on towards the water without looking back. Marta went home and put the broom away, and for the first time in her life she left the forest floor exactly as the wind had made it.