Close up of a solid black ankh tattoo with a bold, simple outline on a person's side or torso.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Solid black ankh on skin

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black ankh, with an oval loop on top of a crossbar and a long vertical shaft, sits centrally on pale skin. The edges are clean and the ink is fully saturated, with no visible shading or fine detail. The plain background of skin fills the frame, with a dark, blurred edge at the top right.

Other Ankh Cross

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bread wouldn't rise. Somewhere in the Bay of Biscay a locker had sprung a leak overnight, and the flour had gone to paste, and Mr Pardoe was already banging his mug on the serving hatch wanting his dinner at four bells. I slapped the dough onto the range plate, cursed it, and turned round to find the bulkhead above the stove looking back at me.

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Eli Tanner had drawn it there in chalk the winter before he went ashore. A cross with a loop balanced on top, like a key with a head on it. When the others asked what it meant, he said the old Egyptians used it for life, and that a cook needed all the luck he could get below the waterline. They called him soft. He only laughed and kept his galley clean, and when his lungs gave out in Falmouth nobody had the heart to wipe the wall.

The swell came up through the deck plates while the bread baked, and the galley lamp swung in wide arcs across the chalk so that the loop seemed to slide open and shut. I wet a rag and rubbed at the crossbar, meaning to clean it, then stopped with my hand flat against the wood.

When the loaves came out, they were heavy and close, but they were edible. Mr Pardoe ate two standing up and said nothing. I kept the chalk, rewetting the lines each morning before the first bell, and I never told the men that I'd stopped believing in it, because the bread still came out right whenever I remembered to touch the wall.