Small solid black cross tattoo on skin, with a US quarter placed beside it for scale.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small black cross tattoo beside a quarter

Black and grey · Photo

A solid black cross tattoo with bold, straight-edged arms sits on pale skin. A small light patch sits where the arms meet, and a US quarter lies beside the design to show its size. The image is a close, straight-on shot with a plain background.

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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

Ida Pryce turned the quarter over before she named a price for anything. Nell had slid it across the counter on Tuesday with a receipt for a Greyhound ticket and a request for twelve pounds, and said it was her grandad's. The eagle had worn to a smudge, but the rim still carried a nick like a letter T, and Ida knew that nick. She had seen it on a tattooist's tray in a back room off Hessle Road forty years ago, when she was a girl sweeping up for her uncle.

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The tattooist had been an American sailor who took payment in whatever coin the customer had. Nell's grandad had come in with a bottle of rum and a quarter from Ohio, and asked for a plain black cross on the inside of his wrist, bold and square, nothing fancy. The sailor had inked it without a stencil, steady as a carpenter, and left a small clean patch where the arms met, which he said was where the nail went in and the wound closed over. Her uncle had called it a load of nonsense. Ida had thought it was the best thing she had ever watched being made.

She counted out twelve pounds in notes and pushed them back across the counter, then kept the quarter. Nell frowned and opened her mouth. Ida held up a hand. "Your grandad paid for that cross once already," she said. "Go and catch your coach." The girl went, and the bell above the door rang behind her, and Ida put the coin in the drawer where she kept things that had come home.

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