Black and grey photo of a simple bold black cross tattoo on the back of the neck, with hair falling at the top of the frame.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Simple cross on the back of the neck

Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A single upright cross in solid black ink sits centrally on the back of a neck, with the crossbar set about a third of the way down. The lines are thick and uniform with no shading, and the rest of the image is in soft greys and white. The composition is tight, with hair visible at the top edge and a dark garment at the bottom.

Neck 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

Dad always marked the sick trees with a cross of black tar before the men came with the saw. One long stroke, one short, the crossbar set low so the mark sat where the rain wouldn't wash it off by Michaelmas. I held the pot for him the summer the canker came up from the Hollow Field, and I thought the whole job was the cutting.

Keep reading

By the end of August we had marked forty-one trees. The Bramley by the gate was the last on the list, planted by his grandfather the year the railway came through, and it was still dropping fruit the size of fists onto the long grass. Dad stood under it with the brush in his hand for a long time while the wasps worked the windfalls. He said the canker had only reached one low limb, and that if we took the limb the tree might stand another ten years.

So I took the limb. I sawed it myself with the old bowsaw while he sat on the cart tailboard, and I did not look at him once. When I finished, I dipped the brush and set the cross on the trunk where the bark was clean, the crossbar a third of the way down, the way he had taught me. Then I stood back. It looked like a stitch closing a wound.

He never asked me to mark anything again. The Bramley is still standing, lopsided and green, and every September I walk up the rows with my hands in my pockets. The tar has weathered to a grey smudge, but I can still find it with my thumb, low on the bark, where the rain never quite reached.