Black and grey shaded cross tattoo with cracked-stone detailing and flowing script lettering on the upper thigh.

Shaded cross with script quote on thigh

Lettering · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A large shaded cross sits at the centre of the image, with dimensional bevelled edges and dark, cracked-looking grey shading across its arms. Flowing black script wraps around the cross on both sides, reading "Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for you are with me". The photograph is taken straight on, with the skin lit evenly and the design filling most of the frame.

Lettering Thigh Cross Script Lettering Quote Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer, the lot of you, and mind the bench, it has been loose since the flood. Brother Anselm did not carve that cross in the north quarry, whatever the pilgrims tell you. He was sent for in the hard winter, when the bell at Saint Oswin's cracked clean through and the abbot wanted a new cross on the gate before Lady Day.

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The stone they gave him was grey slate from the ridge, split along its grain. Slate does not forgive a careless chisel, and Anselm's hands shook with the cold, so he worked by lamplight through the dark months, bevelling each arm until the edges caught the flame like a blade. Where the frost had cracked the stone, he left the cracks alone and darkened them with soot and linseed. 'Every crack is a road,' he told the boy who fetched his water. 'Walk the road and you come out the other side.'

The cross went up on the feast morning and the whole valley came to see it. Then the snow began and did not stop for nine days. The old abbot stood at the gate with his hood pulled low, reciting the psalm about the valley and the shadow, and Anselm, who had lettered every line of it in black ink around the stone, found his own voice would not rise past the part about fearing no evil.

When the thaw came, the boy climbed up to scrape the lettering clean and found the arms still square under all that white. Meltwater had run down the cracks, frozen, and run again, and it had gone on running into the letters. Anselm was long dead by then, but the boy said the old man had known exactly what he was doing with that broken-looking stone.