Black tribal-style cross tattoo with scrollwork flourishes on the upper arm, shown in a photograph of healed skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal cross on an upper arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large black cross with angular, tribal-style outlines and curling scroll details fills most of the frame. The bold solid black linework is set against a lighter area of skin, with a small open cross left unfilled at the centre. The image is shown in black and grey, with a dark background on the left and a wire mesh surface at the right.

Blackwork Upper arm Cross Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The third bumper is the one that won't sit flat, so you lean on it with your knee and tack the seam while the sun drops behind the water tower at Calder Wells. Hollis wants the cross by Friday. He wants it on the gate of the lot where the Greyhound used to stop, and he wants it black, because the chrome has gone chalky in the heat and he says it looks like a dentist's sign.

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You work the scrolls first, because scrolls forgive mistakes. Bedframe rails bent cold over the vice, curled into tails that flick off the arms like something blown sideways. The points come from a pickup's tailgate, flattened and notched with the angle grinder until the edges hold a line. Dust gets into everything. By nine the desert has gone blue and cold, and you can hear the wire mesh of the yard fence ticking as it cools.

When it is assembled you stand back and see what you have made: a heavy black cross with its arms spitting ornament at every corner. Hollis comes out with two cans of cold lager and asks why you left the middle open. You tell him the centre was never going to be steel. You cut it out on purpose, so the wind has somewhere to go and the road can see through it from the highway.

Next morning he hangs it on the gate. The sun comes up behind it and throws the open square across the sand, a pale cross laid over the tarmac, and a lorry driver slows to look at it, then pulls onto the verge and sits there a while with the engine running.