Colourful watercolour-style cross tattoo on a lower leg, with green, red, orange, yellow and purple brushstrokes and black ink at the centre.

Watercolour-style cross on a calf

Calf · Mixed · Photo

A painterly cross sits on the calf, built from a vertical black and grey stroke with a horizontal purple and black stroke across it. Loose splashes of green, red, orange and yellow radiate behind it, with small droplet-like circles scattered around the design. The soft, blended edges of the colour and the bare skin around it give the piece a loose, painted look.

Calf Cross Brush stroke Droplet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow shut the Drover's Rest on the third night, and by the fourth I had run out of reasons to stay in my room. Mrs Pell kept the fire banked in the taproom and let me set my paints on the long table by the window, where the light was grey but honest. I was there to finish a commission for the chapel at Scarth, a wayside cross that the damp had eaten down to a shadow on the wall. The parish wanted it repainted in its old colours. I had never seen the old colours. I had only Mrs Pell's stories.

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She told me the cross had been painted every spring by a girl called Ada Riddle, who mixed her pigments from crushed hedgerow berries and river clay. Green from nettle leaves, red from rowan, a yellow she would never name. Ada, Mrs Pell said, never painted the wood straight. She flicked the brush so the colour bled past the edges and the cross seemed to be running off the wall into the weather. That evening I tried it on scrap paper, and the bristles hissed and spat exactly as she had described.

On the fifth morning the snow stopped, and a ploughman's boy came stamping in to say the road was open. I should have packed up. Instead I drew the black upright first, one clean pull, then laid the purple bar across it while the paper was still wet. The colours ran into one another like weather over a valley. Mrs Pell watched from the hearth and said nothing until I lifted the sheet and let the drips fall onto the boards.

"That's her," she said, and went back to her bread. I stayed on my knees for a while, counting the small bright beads of water that had flown off the brush and dried on the floor, and I did not clean them up.