Small black tattoo of a cross above a heart-like shape on the upper back of a person wearing a lace dress.

Small cross tattoo on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A small, single-line tattoo sits on the upper back near the spine, showing a cross above a heart-like outline with a curved hook below. The ink is dark grey or black against the skin, and the linework is simple and crisp. The shallow-focus shot shows the back and shoulder in a cream lace dress against a blurred green background.

Back Cross Heart Lace

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry at Greyhythe had no bridge to answer to, so the crossing belonged to whoever could read the current. Old Hanna Pell read it with a pole that ended in a curved iron hook, and with a small brass cross nailed above the stern, where the tide had worn it smooth. The boat was flat and black and went wherever the mud let it.

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One autumn a boy came down the bank carrying a box the size of a loaf. He said his sister had asked him to take it to the chapel on the far shore before the fog closed the water. Hanna asked what was in it. He said a heart, then looked ashamed, because he had been told not to say.

She didn't open it. She had carried enough boxes across to know the weight of a thing that mattered. She set the pole against the reeds, hooked the ring of the old mooring post, and pulled them through the grey. Halfway over the fog thinned enough to show a row of lanterns on the far bank, and the boy stopped rowing to count them and found there was one more than he had expected.

At the landing a woman in a long pale coat waited with her hand out. The box went to her. She lifted the lid just far enough to see, shut it, and gave the boy a coin with a hole through it, the kind you hang on a string. Hanna took the boat back alone. The fog came in behind her like a sheet being drawn, and somewhere out in it the hook caught on something that pulled back, gently, the way a child tugs a sleeve. She let it go. Some debts are kept by the water, and the water is patient.