Small solid black cross tattoo on the back of a woman's neck, with her dark hair tied up in a ponytail.

Small cross tattoo on the back of the neck

Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph taken from behind shows a small, solid black cross tattoo on the back of a person's neck, with the hair pulled up to one side. The cross has simple, even black linework with no shading. The ink is the only colour, set against plain pale skin, with a car interior blurred in the background.

Neck Cross

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The porters on Ward Seven say the cross above the linen room door was there before the building got its new doors, and that the first night man to keep the key was told never to take it down. Old Hanna Preston, who ran the night desk for thirty years, put it plainly: a cross on a wall is a place you can always find in the dark, and anyone lost in a corridor will walk towards a thing that does not move.

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So when Ivo Brandt took the late shift, he was handed the key on a loop of surgical tape and the same rule. Most nights nothing happened except the lift groaning between floors and the vending machine humming in the day room. Then one February a woman in a grey coat stood at the station at half past three and asked for her husband in bed nine. Bed nine had been empty since the autumn. Ivo told her so as gently as he could. She said she could smell his pipe on the stairs, so he walked her down the corridor past the lift to the linen room, where the cross hung in the lamplight. She laid her hand flat on the wood and let out a breath, the way you do when you find a glove you thought was lost.

When he turned round, the corridor was empty. There was no woman, no coat on the hook, only a faint smell of tobacco that might have been his own jacket. He wrote in the log: 3.40, visitor located, linen room. He left out the pipe-smoke and the hand on the wood.

At seven the day sister asked who had been on bed nine, and Ivo said nobody. He hung the key back on its hook beneath the cross and ran his thumb along the tape, which had gone soft from the years of other hands.