Small black cross tattoo in fine line style on the side of a finger with glitter nail polish, against a plain background.

Small cross tattoo on a finger

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A small, simple black cross is tattooed on the side of a finger, pointing upward with a short crossbar. The lines are thin, solid and even, with no shading. The skin is light and the background is a plain off-white, so the ink stands out clearly; the nails have pale blue glitter polish with pink flecks.

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 sorting office at Kelling Cross had one window, one ink pot and a rule nobody had written down: anything addressed only to the crossroads went to Ada Pryce. Nobody else knew what to do with it. In March 1954 there were four such letters on the shelf, yellowed at the corners, and Ada had already marked each with the small black cross she used for undeliverable post, one stroke down and one across, quick as a full stop.

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The fifth came on a Tuesday, damp from the van's leaking roof. The hand was careful, the kind taught by nuns or by a father who checked homework. It said only: To whoever keeps the crossing, please give this to the man who waits by the signpost on Sundays.

Ada turned it over twice. The signpost had been knocked flat by a lorry the winter before last and never replaced, so the only thing left to wait by was the stone base and the bus shelter with its cracked bench. She knew that bench. She had sat on it herself the summer her mother was ill, watching the single bus pass without stopping.

She walked up the lane at half past five with the envelope in her coat pocket. The bench was empty except for a jam jar of cow parsley, the stalks already browning at the rims. Ada sat down and slit the flap with her thumbnail. Inside was a single line in the same careful hand: Tell him I have stopped waiting for the bus and started walking. When she pushed her hand back into her pocket, the ink on her fingers had left a faint cross on the lining, and she left it there.