Small black fine line cross tattoo on the neck behind a person's ear, with cartilage piercings visible on the ear above it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small cross behind the ear

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A small, simple black cross sits on the skin behind the ear, with hair pulled back from the side of the head. The lines are thin and solid with no visible shading, and the tattoo is set against a soft, warm skin tone. The composition is a close side view centred on the ear, with the cross in the lower left and the piercings in the upper part of the frame.

Fine line Neck Cross

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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 in close, the lot of you, and mind the peat, it spits when the wind comes round the north side. Your mothers will not have told you this one, for the cross-marked men were never fond of telling it. Aonghas Mac Leòid was the last keeper of the Sgeir Bheag light, and the sea had taken his brother off the Stacks in the winter of the big storms.

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Every spring he walked the shore below the chapel with a bucket of lime and a stick, and at each place a boat had come ashore he marked a small cross on the nearest rock, one arm a shade shorter than the other so the rain would not wash it smooth. Folk laughed at him. The minister said the marking was vanity, and the fishermen said it was bad luck to count the drowned out loud. Aonghas counted anyway, under his breath, while he worked.

The year the gale took the Mary Ann, he found a stone nobody had marked. It sat above the weed line on the north skerry, clean and pale, and he stood over it a long time with the lime going hard in the bucket. Then he knelt and scratched a cross no bigger than his thumb, and went home and slept for the first time since Martinmas.

Come the autumn, the Mary Ann's skipper walked into the chapel alive, wet to the knees and cursing, having been put ashore on the far island by a current nobody could account for. He asked after Aonghas and was told the keeper had gone out to the skerry at dusk and not come back. The lime bucket was found upright on the shingle. The cross is still on that stone above the weed line, and if you go at low water you will see that its arms are not quite level, as if the man who made it was in a hurry to be finished.