Close photo of a small fine line black cross tattoo on the lower abdomen, just above the waistband of grey sweatpants, in a sepia tone.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small cross tattoo on the lower abdomen

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A small, simple cross is drawn in thin black linework on the skin of a torso, positioned low on the abdomen above the waistband of loose grey sweatpants. The shirt is lifted to the side and the lower body is cropped, so only the midsection is shown. The photograph is sepia toned, so the ink appears as a dark brown-black with no colour.

Fine line Other 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

Now sit closer, because the wind takes the good parts out of this one. You want the old Pennick orchard above Lydbrook, the one with crooked rows running down to the brook. Every tree in it was grafted by one man, Tobias Wren, who kept his knives rolled in oilcloth and never once nicked his thumb, or so the village swore.

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Late in August, the summer the mill burned, Tobias walked the rows with a lantern in broad daylight and a pot of pitch on his hip. He was hunting canker. Wherever he found a weeping limb, he cut a small cross into the bark at the height of a man's belt, a line no deeper than a fingernail, so the sap would know where to close. His daughter Nell followed with the wax. She asked him once why a cross and not a circle, and he said a circle has nowhere to start.

Nell went to Bristol the next spring and never came back to the orchard. The crosses did not stay quiet. They darkened over the years into grey seams the pickers learned not to scrape, and when the council sent a surveyor to clear the orchard for a bypass, he found them on every tree, all facing the same way, like a hand pointing down the hill. His assistant, a quiet girl from the village, traced one with her thumb and said her grandmother had made that cut.

The bypass bent around the orchard in the end, and the council called it a lucky accident. Every August since, someone has left a single windfall apple at the foot of the oldest tree, beneath its small pale cross, though nobody in the village can say who started it.