Black and white photo of a woman seen from behind with a small solid black cross tattoo between her shoulder blades on the upper back.

Small cross tattoo on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with her hair up is photographed from behind in black and white, with her face turned away from the camera. A small, simple black cross sits on her upper back, near the centre between the shoulder blades, drawn with clean, solid lines. The plain dark background makes the tattoo the clear focal point, and the off-shoulder top and a small stud earring are also visible.

Back Cross Woman Hair Back Earring

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

"Hold the chisel the way I showed you, not like a pen, or you'll skid across the stone and take your thumb with you," Dad said, and I held it the way he showed me, and the first stroke rang off the gritstone like a dropped spoon in a chapel.

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The stone was a boundary marker for the Hebden Moor estate, the last of forty the Ashworth family had set along the old packhorse road before the enclosure men came. My job that October was to recut the worn faces so the surveyors could find them again. Most were just arrows and initials. Number twenty-two had a cross on its north face, two lines crossing at the middle, and the weather had softened them into a shallow dish that held rain like a bowl.

I wanted to make it deeper than the rest. Dad said no. "A cross is only two straight lines agreeing to meet," he said, wiping grit from his glasses. "Keep the cuts square and the edges clean, and it'll outlast the both of us." He measured the arms with a length of twine knotted at the centre, and I cut each stroke to the twine, and by dusk my palms had blistered and the cross stood out as sharp as a freshly ruled ledger.

The surveyors came in March. One of them, a thin man with a notebook, stood in the wet heather and traced the cross with his finger without quite touching it. He wrote the bearing down, then looked up and asked whether I had cut it. I said yes. He said it was the cleanest thing on the whole line, tucked his notebook away and walked off towards the next stone.

Dad never told me whether he'd been proud. He just untied the twine from the stone, wound it round his wrist, and wore it there until the day he died.