Two-panel photo: a small black cross tattoo on the inside of a wrist, and a fine-line black feather outline with cursive script inside it on the inner arm.

Small cross and feather wrist tattoos

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

The left panel shows a small solid black cross on the inside of a wrist, with the hand resting palm up and maroon nail polish visible. The right panel shows a fine-line feather outline with a looping, cursive-style line inside it, drawn in black ink on pale skin. Both pieces are black ink only, and the photos are taken close up against plain skin with a little background visible.

Fine line Other Cross Feather Script

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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

Sit closer, the fire's dying and the brothers won't thank me for a loud tale after compline. You want to hear about Brother Edwin and the goose feather? Good. Listen.

Keep reading

Edwin copied psalms at Hollin Abbey in the years when the rain came sideways off the fells and the ink froze in its pot by the window. He had one good quill, a grey flight feather he'd taken from a goose that had wandered into the cloister and been too stupid to leave. Every morning he trimmed it with his little knife, and every morning the abbot said the tip was too soft for capitals.

One winter the prior sent him to the far cell to copy a lost gospel that a pedlar had carried up from the coast. Edwin worked three weeks by one candle. On the last night he found a line in the margin, written in a hand nobody at Hollin could read, looping and running off the page like a stream over stones. He sat with it until the candle drowned in its own wax. Then he took his feather, drew the shape of its vane around those words, and inked a small cross at the base, because a thing that keeps going needs something to stand on.

In the morning the prior found the page and wept, though he would never say why. The feather went back to the cloister yard, Edwin went back to his psalms, and nobody ever told him whose hand had written the line.

Now, that's the tale. Mind the step on your way out; it's older than the abbey, and so is the cross carved above the door.