Black and grey tattoo design of a cross with feathered wings and a ribbon banner reading John 3:16.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Winged cross with John 3:16 banner

Black and grey · Flash

A drawn tattoo design showing a large cross with a faceted, shaded edge at the centre, flanked by two feathered wings with soft grey shading. A ribbon banner across the lower part of the cross reads John 3:16, and curled swirls sit above the wings. The work uses pencil-style grey shading and contrast on a plain white background.

Wing Cross Banner Feather Ribbon Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sports hall at Ashgrove still smelled of floor polish, and someone had hung paper wings from the basketball hoops, the sort we once cut out for the Christmas nativity. Mr Pryce had been dead six years, but his lectern was still pushed against the far wall with a tea urn balanced on top. I was looking for Dean Hollis, who had read the lesson at every assembly for five years in a voice like a church bell with a cold.

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I found him by the urn, picking a sticky label off his lanyard. There was grey at his temples now, and a thin gold chain under his collared shirt that he tucked away when he saw me looking. "Still reading?" I asked. He laughed. "Only the menus." Then he said that his mum had made him promise to keep one thing from the Easter play, the year he was cast as the angel at the tomb, and he had kept it in his wallet for thirty years.

The wings had been a coat hanger bent into a frame and a pillow's worth of feathers glued on with Pritt Stick. The cross was the prop that refused to stand up. Mr Pryce had painted it silver and tied a strip of blue ribbon along one arm, lettering the verse on it in biro because there was no time for anything better. On the night, one wing snapped in the first scene and Dean held the other up with both hands for the whole act. Nobody laughed, not even the Year Eights at the back.

"Here," he said, and unfolded the ribbon on the trestle table. The biro had faded to the colour of weak tea, but the letters were still legible: John, and then 3:16. He smoothed it flat with his palm. "I never knew what it meant," he said. "I just knew he wanted us to get it right." I read it aloud in that hall where we had all once learned it, and for a moment the urn stopped ticking. Then he folded the ribbon back along its old creases, carefully, the way you handle something you mean to carry for another thirty years.