White ink tribal-style cross tattoo with scrollwork and diamond details on the forearm, shown against a colourful patterned background.

White ink tribal cross on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A cross made of ornate tribal-style scrollwork and small diamond shapes is tattooed in white ink on the forearm. The lines are soft and raised-looking, with the design built from curling flourishes that repeat symmetrically along the arms and stem. The ink is light against the skin, and the colourful patterned surface behind the arm is out of focus.

Forearm Cross Tribal Scrollwork Diamond White ink

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Ansell had the scaffold up by six, and by seven the chapel of St Ebba smelled of wet lime and cold stone. Nell was given the brush because the boy before her had cried at the ladder. She was to match the scrollwork on the east ceiling, which had flaked away in the winter gales, and she had only a pattern sheet, brown with damp, showing a cross built from curls and small diamonds.

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The lime went on white and looked, at first, like nothing. It sank into the old plaster and dried a shade paler than the rest, so that she could only see her work when the sun came low through the south window and raked across it. Ansell said that was the point of good lime: it kept its secrets until the light asked for them. She worked the flourishes outward from the centre rosette, mirroring each curl on the left arm with one on the right, counting diamonds under her breath.

On the ninth day she found the sheet had been drawn backwards. The stem ran the wrong way, and the diamonds sat where the arms should have been. She thought of scraping it all and starting again, but the lime had already set, and a cross that was wrong in one direction was still a cross from the nave. She left it. Ansell came up the ladder with his tea, looked for a long time, and said only that the parish would never know.

At evening prayer the light came through the window at the angle it always did, and the whole ceiling lifted out of the dark, pale curls on pale plaster, the wrong cross and the right one both standing. Nell sat in the back pew with her arms aching and watched the diamonds catch the gold, and she thought that most things were like that, mistakes you only saw when someone turned the lamp.