Close view of a small purple and teal X tattoo on the inner forearm near the wrist, with a tiny dot above it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two small coloured crosses on a wrist

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A young woman holds up a white t-shirt with a large X graphic, with her arm extended at the left of the frame. On her inner forearm near the wrist sits a small tattoo of two simple X shapes, one purple and one teal, with a tiny dot above them. The linework is bold and minimal, and the photo is taken indoors against a plain light background.

Forearm Cross Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The officer at the booth held the passport up to the light for longer than Maren liked, turning the page as if the stamps might rearrange themselves. Behind her the queue shuffled and sighed. Her wrist ached where the two small marks sat under the sleeve, one violet, one the colour of a swimming pool, each a cross made of two careless strokes. Nobody had asked her about them yet. Her cousin Tobias had drawn them on her with a fountain pen the summer they were nine, then promised to go over them in ink properly, and never had.

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The officer looked up. Did she have anything to declare? Maren said no, and then, because her mouth was dry, said she had a t-shirt in her bag she'd bought in Lisbon, a white one with a black cross printed across the chest, and the officer asked to see it. Maren unzipped the holdall and lifted the shirt out. The cross on it had a sheen of oil-slick colour running through its middle, rainbows bleeding across the black, and the officer turned it over in her gloved hands like a suspect's glove.

There was nothing to find. The officer folded it back along its creases with a care that surprised Maren, then pressed the stamp down so hard the desk shivered. "Enjoy the rain," she said. Maren walked out with the shirt under her arm and the small dot above the crosses, which she had always thought was a full stop, pressing against her pulse. Outside, Tobias was leaning on a car with the engine running, and he lifted his hand, and she lifted hers, and the two marks crossed in the light.