Two small solid black cross tattoos, one on each ankle, with the wearer in sandals on a wooden floor.

Two small black crosses on ankles

Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows the ankles of two people in sandals on a wooden floor, each with a small, solid black cross tattoo. The crosses have simple, bold outlines and flat black fill with no visible shading. The ink is dark against the skin, and the composition is a close, low angle with a denim hem at the top right.

Ankle Cross

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The first cross I ever saw was painted in black pitch on the bark of a Bramley near the lower gate, and my grandfather said it meant the tree was spoken for. Each August, before the pickers came through, he walked the rows with a tin and a stiff brush, marking whatever belonged to the cider mill so nobody stripped it by mistake. Mair and I were twelve that summer and fancied ourselves clever with the ledger, matching every mark to a line in his square capitals at the kitchen table.

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On the last Saturday of August we found one with no line beside it. It stood on the far slope where the grass grew long, a young Discovery with its first real crop hanging low, and the cross on its trunk was still tacky enough to take a fingerprint. Mair read the ledger twice, moving her lips, in case we had missed it. Then she read it aloud. Planted the year of the girls, it said, and under that, nothing at all, only a dash where a name should have been.

We sat under it until the light turned orange and ate two apples each, sharp and sour, neither of us saying what we were both thinking. Grandfather had never once told us which trees were ours. He had let us find out in the ledger like everything else he kept to himself. When Mair finally stood and brushed the grass from her jeans, she pressed her palm flat against the cross so the black came off on her hand.

"Well," she said, holding up her blackened palm, "now we know whose it is." I wrote her name in the dash that evening, and after a while, mine beside it.