Fine line black cross tattoo on the side of a foot, just below the ankle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small cross on the side of a foot

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A small, simple cross is tattooed in black ink on the side of a foot near the heel. The thin, even linework is solid black with no shading, and the cross sits off-centre on the pale skin. A small mole sits to the lower right of the cross, and the foot rests on a light fabric.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The paint is still tacky when Nell Garrity shouts from the towpath that the Tallow is coming down the cut hard, and you have a choice between finishing the cross on the lock beam or wiping it off with your sleeve. You keep the brush moving. Black gloss, thin as a hair, one upright stroke and a short bar set a finger's width above the rivets where the wood has gone soft.

Keep reading

Nobody on the Severn Lock Company wanted to be told why the cross was there. Old Tom Pryce had painted the first one in 1931, after the Ada Mae went under the gates in fog, and every keeper since had touched it up each spring the way you would mend a fence. You were told it was so the men on the water would know where the beam ended and the river began. You suspected it was for something else, but nobody said so.

The Tallow comes through with her bow wave slapping the brickwork. Her skipper, a young man in a borrowed cap, looks up at the beam as he passes under it and lifts two fingers from the tiller. You lift the brush in return. Paint drips from the bristles onto the cobbles, and you watch it harden there, a small dark seed.

Later, when the lock is empty and the water lies still as tin, you go back and look at the cross. It is slightly crooked, as they all are, and it will look worse in a year when the wood cracks under it. Still, a mark that gets repainted every spring seems more honest than one that stays perfect. You fill the tin, screw the lid down, and walk home across the lock gates.

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