Small teal ribbon-style cross tattoo with black outline and curled flourishes, placed on the back of a woman's neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Teal ribbon cross on the back of the neck

Neck · Colour · Photo

A small cross formed from looping ribbon-like lines sits centrally on the back of a person's neck, with curled scroll flourishes at the crossbar. The outlines are black and the ribbon sections are filled in teal and green, with a faint reddened area of skin around the design. The composition is tight, with the head, updo hair and an ear visible above the tattoo and bare skin below.

Neck Cross Ribbon Swirl Scroll Flourish

Find an artist for this

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

Sit closer, the fire's gone low and I'm too old to shout over the cart wheels. You want the dyer's ribbon? Then hear it right, from the start of the wet season, when the river at Calder Ford ran the colour of wood ash.

Keep reading

Mirela the dyer had one vat that never sulked. Woad from the south bank, weld laid over it, and a pinch of sea salt she bought from a Phoenician trader who swore it came off the same tide as the moon. The cloth came out teal, the green of shallow water over chalk. Nobody in the town could match it, so when the magistrate's wife came asking for a ribbon long enough to bind the cross on her husband's grave, Mirela said no.

"Then make me a knot that means the same thing," the woman said, and she slapped a silver coin on the bench hard enough to ring.

Mirela did not sleep that night. She twisted three strands, looped them over and under like a snake swallowing its own tail, and let the ends curl out at the crossbar into little scrolls, because a plain line bored her and the gods, she said, liked a flourish. At dawn the ribbon had made a cross with no ends at all. The magistrate's wife came back, held it up to the light, and said nothing. She tied it at the nape of her neck, under her hair, where only someone standing close behind her could see it. Then she paid in full, and that was the one coin in this whole story that was ever counted twice.