Fine line tattoo of a small pale cross on the inner wrist, with the hand curled upward and pale nails visible.

Small cross on the inner wrist

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A hand is curled upward, showing the inner wrist, where a small upright cross is tattooed. The cross has thin, even lines in a pale, almost white ink that stands out against the skin. The plain red background and warm lighting keep the focus on the wrist and the small design.

Fine line Other Cross

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Hebden Row ever asked me why I chalked a cross on the gateposts after dark. They assumed it was for the coal man, or the rent man, or the boys who ran off with the washing. I let them assume. Lamplighting is a trade of small habits, and mine was a thin white stroke, two strokes really, struck low on the wood where the lamp's glow would catch it and nobody's eye would linger. My mother had done the same on the byre door in Wensleydale, and I saw no reason to stop when I came down to the mills at fourteen.

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That February the fog came off the canal and sat in the streets for nine days. I went out each evening with my pole and my tin of chalk, lit the gas in Albert Street, then doubled back to mark the posts of the families whose men were down the pit or out on the river with the ice. Mrs Ackroyd at number twelve had a bairn with a cough like a saw. Old Pilling at the corner had nobody left to fetch his coal. I marked them all and never once called it a prayer.

On the ninth night the wind swung round and cleared the sky so fast the stars looked surprised. I came to my own door, the last on the row, and found it already marked. Someone had been at it before me, a wobbling cross in whitewash, the arms uneven, the foot pressed hard as if the hand had been shaking. Nobody in the house had the nerve to climb a ladder that week except my sister's boy, who was nine and had been told he could not go out.

I stood there with the pole on my shoulder, looking at that crooked mark until the gas behind me guttered and went out. Then I went in, took the boy's cold hands in mine, and said nothing about it at all. Some things are only ever kept by someone small enough to be overlooked.