Small black fine line cross tattoo on the neck just behind the ear, with the hair pulled up.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small cross behind the ear

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A small, simple cross is tattooed on the skin behind a person's ear, with the head turned away from the camera. The cross is drawn in thin, solid black linework with no shading. The neck, hair and a light ear piercing are visible against a pale background with a doorway in the distance.

Fine line Neck Cross

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The keep at Harrowgate had been down to its bones for two hundred years when Mam sent me up the hill with a bucket of lime and a chisel I was too young to hold properly. Nobody wanted the castle rebuilt, only surveyed, and the surveyor was Mr Ashdown, who walked the walls with a notebook and a face like wet paper. He had one rule. Every stone he passed, he touched, and every stone he trusted got a small cross scratched on its face so the masons after him would not argue about it.

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I learned to scratch them thin. He said a heavy cross looked like a warning and a light one looked like a prayer, and a prayer was what the village needed from a wall. By the third week my crosses were the only neat thing on the site. I put them where the mortar had gone soft behind the old well-house, on the lip of the postern gate, on a lintel shaped like a sleeping cat.

On the last afternoon of the survey the rain came sideways off the moor and Mr Ashdown sat in the gatehouse with his boots steaming. He asked which stone I had marked last. I pointed at the wall beside the door, a cross no bigger than my thumbnail, cut right where the tower met the curtain. He looked at it a long time, then shut his notebook without writing anything in it. "That one's sound," he said. "Leave it be."

Thirty years on, they rebuilt the keep around that stone, and the cross is still there, the only thing on the hill I ever made that nobody has had to fix.