Healed watercolour-style cross tattoo in teal, purple, pink and yellow with the script words Lead me to the cross, on a forearm.

Watercolour cross with script on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A cross is filled with soft, blended washes of teal, purple, pink and yellow that fade at the edges, giving a painted look. The words Lead me to the cross are written in thin dark script across the upper part of the cross and down its length. The forearm fills the frame against a blurred background with pink shoes and a tie-dye top.

Lettering Forearm Cross Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You hold the tiller with your hip while the fog swallows the towpath, and the only light is the lamp on the bow, swinging. Your brother's paint tins rattle in the cabin, their lids never quite sealed after the last canal job. Somewhere ahead the lock gates should be, but all you can hear is the weir.

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Mrs Adeyemi on the bank said the cross on the chapel spire can be seen from the top lock on clear nights. Tonight is not clear. You have a bundle of pale cloth, a chart pinned under a jam jar, and the words your mother wrote on the back of a tide table: Lead me to the cross. She never went to chapel. She liked the sentence for its rhythm, the way it sounded like a pole being pushed into soft mud.

You sound the horn once, then twice. A dog answers from the left, then a man shouts that the gates are open and to mind the sill. You steer toward his voice, and the fog thins into soft rose and teal, as if someone had dragged a wet brush across the sky. Paint runs off the cabin roof where the rain has got into the tins, and the river takes every colour and carries it downstream.

At the lock you tie off, climb the ladder and find the cross on the spire lit from below, blurred by damp, bleeding into the water beneath it. You stand there until it holds still. Then you untie the rope and let the current take the barge forward, the colours trailing behind you like a wake you were never meant to keep.