Small black fine line cross tattoo on the back of a shoulder, with a second tattoo partly visible near the neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small cross on a shoulder blade

Fine line · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A single small Latin cross is tattooed on the back of a shoulder, with its vertical stroke longer than the horizontal arm. The lines are thin and slightly uneven, in solid black ink with no shading. The subject wears a black top against a warm, yellowish background, and a second tattoo of several characters is partly visible at the base of the neck.

Fine line Shoulder Cross

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chapel roof had gone the winter my father broke his hip, so we held the harvest reckoning in the gatehouse instead, and that was where Mags Pryce found me sitting on the cold step with a nail in my fist. I had been trying to scratch a cross into the lintel above the door. Nothing else in Harrowgate Keep was mine to mark, and the stone was soft enough to take a line if you leaned hard.

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My first stroke came out too thin, and the second wandered off to the left like a drunk man heading home. I could have cut it deeper. Instead I stayed bent over the stone until the light through the arrow slit turned from yellow to the colour of weak tea, and I thought about how Father always said the upright should run long, because a thing standing needs more height than width to hold anything up at all.

Mags came back with bread and a cup of small beer, looked at my crooked mark, and said nothing for a while. Then she pressed her thumb into the groove and said the lines were honest, which is what people say when they mean the work is ugly but they like you anyway. She sat down beside me on the step and we ate the bread in the cold.

When the bells rang for vespers that Sunday, nobody came to the gatehouse, so the cross stayed where it was, uneven and grey with dust. Rain has taken the edge of the lintel since then, but the upright is still there when the light comes in low, longer than its arms, leaning a little to the left.