White line drawing of an ornate cross with outstretched wings and scrolled detailing on a black background, shown as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Winged ornamental cross design

Black and grey · Flash

A white line drawing of an ornate cross with a pointed upper section and scrolled detailing along its vertical bar. Feathered wings extend from the centre crossbar on both sides, with fine curled lines forming the lower scrolls. The design is shown in solid white linework on a plain black background, with no shading or colour.

Cross Wing Scroll Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mortar had been mixed with sheep's wool, Mr Haddow said, to stop it cracking in the frost, and I had spent three days picking it out of a window arch above the chapel door at Carrow Keep. Nobody had climbed up there since the Hollins family left in 1911. Under the fourth layer of whitewash, behind a bird's nest of dry grass, I found a cross cut into the stone, its upper shaft sharpened to a point like a pencil and its arms unfolding into feathers.

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Haddow called it a hedge-mason's joke. The feathers were too careful for that. Each quill had been chiselled separately, and the scrolls at the foot of the shaft curled inward like the ends of a violin scroll, as if the carver had meant them to be read from below. I spent my lunch breaks with a torch and a sheet of tracing paper, copying every line until my wrist ached and the thing stopped looking like stone and started looking like a pair of wings folded over a sword.

On the last afternoon the rain drove in sideways, and I climbed up to tarpaulin the arch. My torch caught a groove I had missed, a fine line running down the centre of the shaft, and I realised the cross was hollow. A tin box had been pressed into the cavity and sealed with lime. Inside was a letter folded into a square, written in a hand I could not read, and a child's ribbon, faded to the colour of weak tea.

I never got the letter translated. Haddow took the box, said the Trust would catalogue it, and the following week the scaffold came down. I still have the tracing. On certain evenings, when the light sits low across the paper, I swear the wings lift a fraction off the sheet, as if the stone had been waiting for someone to notice it could fly.