Small black cross tattoo on the upper back of a woman seen from behind, with her hair tied up and arms raised.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small cross on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman is photographed from behind with her hair tied up and both arms raised to her head. A small, solid black cross sits on her upper back, between the shoulder blades and near the base of the neck. The tattoo is the clear focal point against sun-warmed skin, with a grey vest top and bracelets visible at the edges of the frame.

Back Cross Bracelet Hair bun

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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

Mind the stile, it's rotten on the left, so take the right. There. Now sit, for the path past Hollin Dene is longer than it looks, and the light goes early under the beeches.

Keep reading

Forty winters back, the lord's men came to measure the wood for felling, and they sent a boy ahead with a pot of tar and a brush. Every tree that was to come down, he painted with a black cross at the height of a man's shoulder. Solid, mind, not an outline. Old Mab who kept the ferry told him the wood would take notice, and he laughed at her, being fourteen and sure of most things.

He marked three hundred trunks before the frost came. Then one dusk he walked back to the village with his hands black to the wrist and said the crosses had moved. Not all of them. Only the ones at the edge of the dene, where the ground dips toward the old well. He had walked the line that morning and found each mark sitting a hand's breadth lower on its bole, as though the trees had shrugged and let the cross slide down their backs.

Nobody believed him until the foreman rode out to check and came back pale, saying the trees on the far side had been left standing. The boy had marked those for the axe, and the wood had simply declined. The dene is still there. Go on now, and mind the stile on the left.