Close-up of a small black fine line cross tattoo on the side of a finger of a hand held against a textured white background.

Small cross tattoo on a finger

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A small upright cross is drawn in thin black linework on the side of one finger, on a hand held up against a textured white background. The lines are even and crisp, with no shading, and the cross fills only a small part of the finger. The palette is entirely black ink on pale skin, and the hand fills most of the frame.

Fine line Hand Cross

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide had taken the second floor of St Mary's before Ines Okafor came back to mark it, and the damp had lifted the plaster in long pale curls that crackled under her boots. She had a brass punch, a pot of black pigment and a steady hand, and the survey office wanted one mark per flood line: a small upright cross, four strokes, cut clean enough to read through a lens from the boat. Nobody had asked her why a cross. The form said fixed datum, and she had stopped arguing with forms years ago.

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Her assistant, a boy named Dimitri who had grown up on the barrage walkways, held the torch steady and whistled a tune he had learned from his grandmother's radio. He asked what the cross was for once the water had gone and no one was left to read it. Ines told him the drones would still read it, and the drones did not care about much, which was the point. She drew the upright first, then the crossbar, checking each line against her own thumb to keep the proportions honest.

When the last mark was dry they stood on the landing above the water and watched the grey light come up over the old dock cranes. Dimitri said the cross looked small. Ines said that was the trick of it: small enough to sit inside a finger's width, and still the one thing on the wall that did not move when everything else did. She pressed her palm flat to the wet plaster, felt the cold seep up into her wrist, and let the tide come in.