Sheet of twenty cross designs

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A grid of twenty hand-drawn cross designs in black ink on white paper, arranged in four rows of five. The crosses vary from delicate line work with scrolls, leaves, vines and dots to solid bold strokes, some with textured or dotted fills. The layout is evenly spaced with plenty of white space around each design.

Fine line Blackwork Botanical Cross Flower Leaf Vine Scroll Dot Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had come early to the pass that year, and Marta Quennell counted the crosses on the chapel wall the way other women counted sheep. There were twenty of them, scratched into the lime plaster by a dozen hands over three centuries, and every spring the lay brother scraped the worst of the damp from them with a bone knife. Nobody in Sellwick could say which cross had been first. The oldest had a scroll at its foot like the curl of a fiddle, and the newest, cut by her own grandson before he went down to the mills, had a vine climbing one arm and ending in a tight bud.

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She was sent for the bud at midwinter, when the road below was closed and the bell rope had frozen to the tower. Her task was to carry the lamp from the chapel to the shepherd's hut on the far ridge, where a boy lay sick with a fever that would not break. The lamp had to be lit from the chapel's own flame, the old rule ran, or it would not hold. She went with the wick cupped in both hands and the wind pulling at her skirts, counting the bends in the path by the marks the lay brother had taught her to read in the rock.

At the hut she found the boy awake and hungry, which the shepherd's wife took for a miracle. Marta only shrugged and set the lamp on the sill. Before she left she traced the vine on the doorpost with one finger, a dotted line of nicks that nobody had bothered to fill with paint, and thought of the dozen hands that had made the crosses. Each of them had drawn something that wandered off the stem and came back again, and she supposed that was all a cross had ever asked of anyone.

The lamp burned until morning. When the road opened she walked back down with an empty tin and a pair of raw hands, and the first thing she did in the chapel was look for the bud on the wall. It was still there, a little clearer than before, as if the snow had washed the plaster and left the lines standing.