Neo-trad style tattoo of a winged cross with pink accents, the words Not of this world above and Agape with a small pink heart below, on a person's ribs.

Winged cross with script on ribs

Neo-trad · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A winged cross sits at the centre of the design, with grey shaded wings and a pink heart-shaped motif at its centre. The words NOT OF THIS WORLD are in black block capitals above the cross, and the word Agape is in black script below it with a small pink heart beneath. The linework is bold and the shading is soft grey with teal and pink accents, set against bare skin on the side of the torso.

Neo-trad Lettering Ribs Cross Wing Heart Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swifts had returned to the bell tower the week Brother Anselm sent me up with a pot of grey wash and a brush that smelled of turpentine. The gate cross above the cloister arch had lost its wings to a hard frost, and he wanted them made again before the visitors came up from Durham. I was nineteen and had never been higher than the second loft. I told him I could paint, which was true, and that I had never looked at a wing up close, which was also true.

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The cross was older than the walls around it, cut from one block of pale stone, and whoever carved it had hollowed the arms into little cradles, as if a bird might settle there. I worked four days from a plank slung on ropes. Each morning a small grey swift came down to the sill beside my hand and watched the brush move, as though it were checking my feathers against its own. On the fourth morning I found a folded scrap of paper pushed into the mortar beneath the crossbar. Someone had written one word in faded ink, a word I did not know well then: Agape.

Anselm did not seem surprised when I showed him. He took the paper, turned it over twice, and said his brother Matthias had painted the cross the first time, before he went down to the mills at Consett and never came back up the hill. Matthias had insisted on the small rose-coloured heart at the crossing, the only colour the community allowed in the cloister, and nobody had ever asked him to remove it. Anselm looked up at the wings for a long time before he went back inside.

When the visitors arrived they tilted their heads and said the wings were very fine, and nobody asked why the heart was pink. I kept Matthias's brush, and at compline, when the light falls off the tower, I sometimes watch the swifts go out over the valley and come back again.