Small solid black cross tattoo in a clean fine line style, centred on the upper back below wavy blonde hair.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Simple black cross on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph from behind of a person with wavy blonde hair pulled over one shoulder, showing a small black cross tattoo centred on the upper back. The cross has a long vertical stroke and a shorter horizontal bar, drawn with even, clean linework and solid black ink. The warm skin tone and soft natural light keep the focus on the tattoo against a plain background.

Fine line Back Cross

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 cage went down at six that February with its bell rung twice, which meant the roof was sound, and the men who stepped into it did not look at one another. Eli Marr was fourteen and carried the water can for the hewers, and he had been told that a boy who said his prayers in the shaft would be heard by nobody but the rats.

Keep reading

Down at the face, past the third stopping, a hewer called Dan Corrie had taken a stub of chalk from his pocket and drawn a cross on the timber prop, a long stroke with a short bar across it, the way his mother marked the bread before it went in the oven. He said it was for luck. Eli thought it was for the men who did not come up, but he kept that to himself, and each morning he laid his palm flat against the wood on his way to the water.

The fall came on a Tuesday. Stone shook loose from the crown and the dust hung so thick the lamps were only smudges. When the men dug through, they found Dan pinned under a slab, and Eli crouched beside him with the can, which was empty. Dan asked him to cut the cross deeper so the next shift could find the way out. Eli did, with the handle of his pick, until his knuckles bled onto the grain.

They brought the timber up in the spring, and the overman had it sawn into a board for the chapel door. Nobody ever painted over the cross. Eli worked the coal face until his back was bent and then sat by the chapel gate in his old age, and every man who passed under it touched the wood with two fingers, and nobody ever had to ask why.