Black script lettering arranged in the shape of a cross across the upper back, with a smaller script tattoo near the left shoulder.

Script cross tattoo across the upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph taken from behind of a woman leaning on a kitchen counter with her head down, looking at a phone. A large cross formed from thin black script sits across her upper back, with a small script tattoo near her left shoulder. The image is in natural colour, with the tattoos in black ink against bare skin, and the composition is centred on her back.

Lettering Back Shoulder Cross Script Text Back

Find an artist for this

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 rules were still pinned above the proving cabinet when I took the keys off Dessie's hook, written in his thin black hand and crossed at the middle so the lines ran long one way and short the other. Keep the water blood warm. Never knock the dough back twice. Say good morning to the oven before you light it. I thought them superstition until my second winter, when the flour came in damp and the only thing that saved the batch was doing exactly what the cross said, line by line.

Keep reading

I started on the Tuesday before Christmas, a few minutes before four, when Cutler's Lane was still black outside and the only sound was the extractor fan. The bell over the door rang once and nobody came in. Then it rang again, and I found a girl on the step with her hood up and a carrier bag of wet trainers, asking whether the bakery did early loaves. I told her it did. I didn't ask her name.

She came back every morning that week. She never bought more than a bun, and she always asked for the bread Dessie used to make, the one with the scored cross on top. I had never got the score right. On the Friday I got to the stove early, cut the cross with the razor the way he taught me, and when she came in I pushed the warm loaf across the counter without a word.

She tore off the heel, looked at the split crust, and laughed, a short surprised sound. Then she took a receipt from her pocket, wrote something on the back in pencil and slid it over. Under Dessie's rules, in her careful capitals, it said: LEAVE THE DOOR OPEN FOR WHOEVER KNOCKS FIRST.