Pencil drawing of an ornate tribal-style cross tattoo design with spiked points and scrollwork, shown without a body placement.

Tribal-style cross design in pencil

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a symmetrical cross-like design with sharp, spiked tips at the top and both arms, and a long tapering base. The linework is fine and dark, with scrolling curls and inward-facing hooks filling the central panels. The design is in black and grey on a pale background and is shown as a standalone sketch with no body visible.

Cross Tribal Spike Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The iron cross above the lamp room door had been there since my grandfather kept the light, and every March the salt wind lifted another flake of its black paint. Relief keeper Tallis Corran wanted it taken down. A cross with spikes on every arm, he said, looked less like a blessing than a thing you'd hang on a gatepost to keep people out.

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I climbed onto the gallery with a wire brush the night the Maren Lass went dark on the chart. Fog had come in off the bar like wet wool, and the lamp turned slow above us, throwing its beam into nothing. I could hear the bell buoy somewhere to the south, clanging whenever the swell moved it. Tallis stayed below with the logbook, his pencil scratching out the hours.

When the lamp swept past the cross, its hooked scrolls threw long thin shadows across the wet railings, and for a moment I saw them lay out a line on the water, three gaps between the spikes, each one about the width of a hull. I shouted down to him. He came up the iron stairs two at a time, looked where I pointed, and said nothing for a long while, which from Tallis was as good as an apology.

We fired the signal gun every quarter hour and watched for lanterns. Near dawn a small boat came through the middle gap with its oars muffled, and I swear the cross was the last thing its crew saw of the rock before the grey came up. Tallis fetched the paint pot at first light. The cross stays where it is, and he has never once mentioned the spikes since.