Small fine-line black cross tattoo on the inner wrist, worn beside a gold metal watch strap.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small cross on an inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small upright cross is tattooed on the inner wrist, drawn in thin, even black linework with no shading. The ink is dark and sharp against the skin, and the cross sits off-centre on the left of the frame. A wide gold metal watch strap sits across the lower half of the wrist, and the background is a soft, out-of-focus white window frame.

Fine line Forearm Cross

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Okafor's gold strap came across the counter on a Tuesday in February, wrapped in a chamois the colour of weak tea, and I knew before I unfolded it that it would not fetch what he wanted. Heavy links, polished until the window behind me reflected in every one of them. Gold-plated, I said, and watched his face do the thing faces do when they have been told something they already suspected.

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I wrote it in the ledger the way my father taught me, pen pressed hard enough to show through to the carbon beneath: item, weight, condition, and a small cross in the margin where I mark anything I have doubts about. Ten pounds, I offered. He asked for thirty. The light came sideways through the frosted glass of the front room, the one with the wire grille, and laid a grid across the counter so that the strap looked as if it had been cut into squares.

We sat there a while. He told me the strap had belonged to his brother, who had worn it on a building site until his hands gave out, and I did not ask which hands. I told him the clasp carried a maker's mark I could not place, and that the cross in the margin was for the clasp, not for him. He laughed at that, properly, the first time all afternoon.

I gave him twenty-two. He signed the book with a left-handed slant, folded the chamois over nothing, and went out into the wet street. Afterwards I opened the drawer, took out the strap and set it on the window ledge where the thin winter sun could find it. The cross in the ledger was still there, small and black and exact, the only mark I had made all day that I was sure of.