Small black fine line cross tattoo on the side of a finger, with the hand resting on blue denim.

Small cross tattoo on a finger

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A hand rests on blue denim, showing a tiny black cross tattooed on the side of the middle finger near the knuckle. The cross has thin, even lines and solid black ink, with no shading. The neutral denim background and soft natural light keep the focus on the small design.

Fine line Hand Cross

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ledger for the Patience had a small black cross beside every lock we worked, and my mother never explained them. She inked them with the fine nib she kept for the tally, each no bigger than a grain of rice, and she made them while the lock was still filling and the boat was rocking against the balance beam. I took them for prayers. Dad said they were only her way of keeping count, and that a woman who counted everything had no need of explanations.

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We worked the Leicester line for eleven summers, and the crosses ran the whole length of the book, down past Foxton, through the flight at Watford, out to the cut where the towpath dips under the old brick bridge. At Hollin Lock, the one with the cracked top gate, she inked two crosses in a row and then sat on the step with her hands in her lap until the water settled. I asked her why twice. She said the first was for the boat and the second was for the lock keeper's dog, which had slipped under the gate the spring before and never come up.

She died in the February of my nineteenth year, somewhere between Braunston and the tunnel, with the tiller still in her hand. Dad sold the Patience that spring. The new owner wanted the ledger for the brass clasp, and I took it back before the papers were signed, because I had seen the last page. Beside my own name, written in her cramped hand when I first signed on as crew at fourteen, there was a cross that I had never noticed.

I sat at the kitchen table last night with the nib and a drop of ink, and I drew one beside her name. It was the smallest thing I had ever made, and the hardest to keep steady.