Small fine line black cross tattoo on the inner wrist of a hand held in a loose fist, against a yellow floral bedsheet.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small cross tattoo on the inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a hand held in a loose fist, showing a small, simple black cross tattooed on the inner wrist. The cross has thin, even linework and solid black ink with no shading. The pale skin, French manicure and yellow floral bedsheet fill the frame around the small design.

Fine line Forearm Cross Ring

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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

No, don't reach for the lamp, let the dark do the work. You want to know why the cross is cut so small, and that's the whole of the tale, so mind your ears. Hollin Keep had been empty two winters when Maud Pennock came up the valley with three goats and a sack of salt. The walls were still standing, mostly. The roof had gone the way roofs go, all at once, and the great hall looked up at the sky as if it had lost an argument with it.

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The carrier who walked the high road then was a thin lad called Tobias Wray, who brought letters from the market town and took no coin for them, only the news. He came up the fell in the autumn fog that thickens the air until a man cannot see his own boots. Three times he got lost in it, and three times he walked off the edge of the bog path. So on the fourth evening Maud took her chisel to the gatepost where the sheep track forks, and she cut a cross there, no bigger than her thumbnail, thin and clean as a stroke of ink.

'Find the cross and keep your left hand to the wall,' she told him. 'That's the road to the warm.' He did. He came through the fog with his palm on the cold stone and the fire lit at the top of the stair. The gatepost came down years after, in a storm that took half the valley, but the stone with the cross was carried down into the churchyard wall at Hollin village, and it is there still, low by the door, where the little ones kneel to touch it before they run out in the rain.

So when the fog comes down on the fell tonight, you think of that. Keep your hand to the wall and look for the small black mark. Somebody's thumb has worn it smooth, and it's not a thumb that ever knew Maud's name.