White ink tribal-style cross tattoo with scrollwork and diamond shapes on a forearm, set against a colourful smiley-face patterned background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

White ink cross on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large cross made of white ink sits on the forearm, built from ornate scrolls, curls and small diamond shapes along the arms and upright. The linework is fine and symmetrical, with the design appearing as a pale raised-looking outline because only white ink has been used. The skin tone is light, and the background behind the arm is a bright, multicoloured pattern of smiley faces.

Forearm Cross Scrollwork Diamond Ornamental

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lace had been sitting on the inspection table at Harrow Ford since half past nine, folded in its tissue like something that might wake. Ruth Tennant had cleared four hundred parcels that morning and none of them had made her hesitate. This one did. She lifted the corner of the paper and found a cross the size of a dinner plate, worked in threads so fine that under the fluorescent strip it looked like nothing at all.

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Marta watched from the far side of the glass partition, her fingers knotted together. 'My grandmother made it for a wedding,' she said when Ruth finally came to the door. 'The groom crossed the river the wrong way and never came back over it. She kept the cross in a drawer for forty years.' Ruth tilted the lace towards the window. Where the light fell across it, the scrolls rose pale off the paper, curling out of the diamonds like frost on a pane, and she saw how each arm ran long and narrow, the way a hand reaches for something it has already let go.

The form needed a stamp for handmade textiles, and the stamp needed a certificate of origin, and the certificate had been issued in a village whose church had burned in 1911. Ruth said so. Marta said she knew, and that her grandmother had told her the same thing in the same flat voice. They sat there while the queue behind the partition thinned and a lorry reversed somewhere out in the rain.

Ruth picked up the pen, looked at the empty box marked remarks, and wrote nothing in it. She folded the tissue back over the cross, pressed the diamonds flat so they would not crease, and slid the parcel across the table. 'Take it home,' she said. 'Hold it up to a window when you get there.'