Fine line black cross tattoo on the side of a finger, with silver glitter nail polish, against a plain light background.

Small cross tattoo on a finger

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a hand with two fingers raised, showing a small black cross on the middle finger between the knuckle and the fingertip. The cross is drawn with thin, even linework in solid black ink, with no shading. The plain pale background keeps the focus on the tattoo, and the fingernails have silver glitter polish.

Fine line Hand Cross

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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

The cuttings are still standing in a jam jar on the windowsill, their pinched tips gone white at the roots, the way your father said they would if you kept the light off them. You are kneeling in the bed beside the greenhouse with a trowel in one hand and a pair of pliers in the other, bending the last of the coat hanger into shape. Mrs Okafor's boy from the flats keeps leaning over the fence to ask what the little crosses are for. You tell him they are for remembering where things are sleeping.

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Each cross is two lengths of wire, the arms squared off by eye and twisted tight at the middle. You push them into the soil at the head of each row, so the frost can't argue with where the onions went in October. Your mother never labelled anything. She trusted her hands, and her hands were good, but hands get tired and then they forget. That is the whole reason for the crosses, though you have never said so out loud.

When you count them, there are five beds and only four wires, and the fifth row is the tulips your mother split from her own border the spring before the hospital. You stand up too fast and the blood rushes to your head, and for a moment the garden tilts like a photograph someone has nudged. Then you go inside, find the black fineliner in the drawer with the string and the dead batteries, and draw a tiny cross on the back of your hand. It is not quite straight. It will be there tomorrow, and that is the point.