Black and white photo of a small solid black cross tattoo between the shoulder blades on a person's bare back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small cross tattoo on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A small, solid black cross sits on the upper back, roughly between the shoulder blades, with the person's head out of frame. The cross has crisp, even edges and is filled with dense black ink, with no shading or colour. The photograph is in black and white, with strong side lighting that shows the muscles of the back against a dark background.

Back 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

Pass me the tin of lamp black, Tom, and mind the lid, it sticks. No, not the broad brush. The fine one with the hog hair gone grey at the tip. We've a cross to paint on the slipway wall before the tide turns, and the ferry company wants it done by Sunday.

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Old Lowry did the first one, back when my father was still a boy. The ferry company had asked him for a saint with a lamp, the sort of thing you'd see in a church window, but Lowry said a saint was too fussy for a wall that gets soaked twice a day. He wanted a plain cross and nothing else. He mixed the black thicker than any man should, so it sat on the whitewash like a shadow that had decided to stay. He laid each arm in a single stroke with a steel rule, and he said the edges had to be clean enough to cut a finger on.

That was the spring the Mary Ann went out in the squall and didn't come back. Her skipper, Eli Dunn, had a wife who walked down to the slipway every morning after that, looking at the wall as if it might tell her something. The tide came up over the stones twice a day, grey and cold, and the sea took the chalk marks and the rope scraps and the broken oars. The cross stayed dry above the high-water line, black and square, and nobody could say how.

They say the tide has never once reached the paint. Me, I reckon it's only that Lowry used too much black, and black holds. Hand me that rag, Tom. Your mother will have the kettle on by now, and I'm not telling this story twice.