Close photo of a small black fine line cross tattooed on the side of a finger, with the hand curled into a loop and pale nails visible.

Small black cross tattoo on a finger

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a hand with a small, simple black cross tattooed on the side of one finger. The cross is drawn in thin, even linework with no shading, and sits near the knuckle. The hand is curled in front of a dark, blurred background with a light grey surface beneath, so the tattoo is the clear focal point.

Fine line Hand Cross Finger Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the third winter after the sea took Harrow Bay, nobody trusted the causeway except the marks. Mum drew them with a grease pencil on the old concrete: a cross where the footing held, a line where it didn't. I was nine when she handed me the pencil and told me to keep the crosses straight, because a crooked one had drowned her cousin's van in the year before the flood took the road for good.

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Most days I walked the causeway at low water with a tin of paint and a plumb line, checking each cross against the stones. The stones moved. Weed grew over the marks and I scraped it off with my thumbnail, until the nail split and I started using the handle of a spoon. Nobody asked why the crosses mattered more than the lines. They just knew to step where I had stepped.

On the last morning of the spring tides, a stranger came up the causeway from the mainland side, carrying a sack of seed and no map. She stopped at the seventh cross and crouched, and I saw she was measuring the gap to the next stone with a fingertip, the way I had been taught. She didn't ask me anything. She just went across, one careful step at a time, touching each cross as she passed it, and waited for me on the far side.

That evening I repainted the seventh cross fresh, black on grey, and wrote the date beside it in the ledger. Under it, in my own hand, I added a small note: crossed at low water, footing sound. Then I went home and slept with the window open, listening for the sea to stop coming in.