Black and white photo of a small, thin-lined fine line cross tattoo on the back of a person's neck, with hair tied up.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small cross on the back of the neck

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A small upright cross is tattooed at the centre of the back of the neck, just below the hairline. The cross has clean, thin, solid black linework with no shading. The black and white photograph is taken from behind, with the subject's hair gathered up and a dark top visible at the lower right.

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

You are fourteen and the Starlight Ballroom in Ramsgate smells of hair oil and wet coats when the last waltz ends. Mr Pryce hands you the broom and a tin of metal polish for the brass rail, and tells you the ladies' cloakroom needs doing before the Saturday crowd. Leave the bandstand alone, he says. The drummer keeps his things there.

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You leave it alone that night. On the Thursday, sweeping under the stage steps, you find a small upright cross scratched into the varnish of the lowest riser. It is thin and deliberate, the kind of mark someone makes with a hatpin when they have time to think. The wood is pale in the groove where it was pressed hard. You run your thumb along it and the wood is cool.

Pryce sees you crouched there and tells you about Eileen, who sang on that stage before the war and knelt by that step between sets. Nobody ever asked her why. You ask whether she's dead. He says she married a Canadian and went out to Winnipeg, and that the cross was there long before the new coat of varnish, and that a coat of varnish is only a coat, and nobody has ever proposed scraping it off.

On Saturday the band plays a slow foxtrot and you stand by the step with the broom while couples turn past. A girl in a green frock lifts her hem clear of the riser without looking down. You keep your hand on the mark a moment longer than you need to, as if you could stop the varnish from cracking.