Back view of a person in a black cut-out swimsuit with arms raised, showing a small solid black cross tattoo at the top of the back near the neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small cross tattoo on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A back view of a person with short dark hair and arms raised, wearing a black one-piece swimsuit with a open back and strappy cut-out detailing. A small, solid black cross tattoo sits at the top of the back near the nape, and a second tattoo is partly visible at the side of the hip beneath the swimsuit. The image is in full colour with a plain grey concrete wall behind, and the tattoo is the only ink on show.

Back Cross

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ray,

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The lift in Glebe Tower made it to the twenty-second floor this morning without the shudder, and I've decided that's your doing, though all you ever did was swear at it and kick the doors. I'm writing because the council want the cross off the wall of the stairwell on fourteen before the painters come.

You'll remember it. Someone scratched a plus sign into the render beside the bin chute, two lines crossing at the height of a grown man's shoulder, and everyone assumed it was kids. Mrs Dunmore swore it was older than the block. I went up with a tin of filler and a wire brush, meaning to make it neat, and found the lines cut far deeper than any graffiti, clean as if done with a compass. I couldn't do it. I sat on the landing a long while with the brush in my lap.

Here's the odd part. Yesterday a girl of about nine came up the stairs with her gran's shopping and stopped in front of it, touched the crossing with one finger, and said, 'That's where you stand if the lift stops.' Nobody had told her that. I asked who had. She shrugged and said the lift had told her, then ran off before I could ask anything else.

So the cross stays. I've pinned a note to the door of the caretaker's cupboard. Come home when you can, and bring that wire brush back, I still need it.

Your sister, Carol