Small solid black cross tattoo on the ankle and inside of a bare foot, photographed in dim light with a warm red tint.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small cross tattoo on an ankle

Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A bare leg and foot rest on a red surface, with a small black cross tattooed on the ankle, just above the inner side of the foot. The cross has simple, solid black linework with no shading, and the rest of the skin is unmarked. The photograph has a strong pink and red colour cast and is taken in dim light against a carpeted floor.

Ankle 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

Sit down, sit down, and mind the lamp, it's the only warm thing left aboard this tub. You want to hear about the Mary Ellen's cook? Old Abel Fenn could not read a word of the Bible, but he could prick a needle through a man's ankle as neat as any parson stitching a hymn sheet. Every hand who signed on at Hull got one small black cross there before we cleared the Humber. Abel said it was so the sea would know whose he was when it came calling.

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Nobody believed that rubbish except the boy, Jem Harrow, who was fourteen and had a mother in Grimsby sending letters the mate kept in his coat. Jem begged Abel for a cross of his own, and Abel said a cross was not a thing you handed a boy who had never been caught in weather. So Jem sat up in the galley every night, grinding soot and lamp oil into ink, and watched the lantern swing across the tin cups until he could draw one on the back of his hand with his eyes shut.

The storm came off the Dogger on the ninth night and the Mary Ellen lay over so far the stove broke its bricks. Three men went over the side. When the mate counted the crew at dawn, he counted Jem twice, because the boy was standing by the foremast with a rope round his waist and a black cross drawn in his own careful hand, the lines running straight as a plumb line.

Abel's needle went down with him in the spring, and his book of marks with it. The mate never asked Jem what he'd drawn, and Jem never said. Years on, when the older hands' crosses had all gone blue and blurred, Jem's was still sharp as a new nail. Some marks are only meant for the one who makes them, and the sea has never once asked who did the painting.