Black and grey realism tattoo of an ornate cross with wood-grain shading and rivet details, sitting on the upper arm.

Wood-grain cross on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large ornate cross fills most of the frame, drawn as a bevelled frame around a panel with wood-grain lines and small round rivets. The linework is dark and clean, and the grain and edge highlights are shaded in soft greys to give a three-dimensional look. The cross is centred on the skin with plain background visible at the edges.

Realism Upper arm Cross Rivet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cook on the herring boat Ellen Rae kept a cross nailed to the bulkhead above the stove. It was oak, cut from a hatch cover that had come off the Dunmore Lass when she struck the Sker in a February gale. Iron rivets held the frame, and the grain ran true from top to bottom, darkened where the smoke had got into it.

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Sanna Fraser, who cooked for the crew of eleven, rubbed the bevelled edges every Sunday with a rag and a little lard. Her brother had been a joiner in Wick before the sea took him, and he had shaped the cross from the offcut before it was ever nailed to anything. When the men asked why a cook should bother with a cross, she said the stove needed watching, and so did the souls of whoever stood before it.

In the spring the nets came up empty three weeks running. The skipper, Duncan Gow, grew short with everyone, and one night he came into the galley cursing the damp. Sanna did not argue. She lifted the cross from its nails, carried it up the companionway, and set it in the bow where the wind would meet it. Then she went back to her potatoes. By morning the shoals were thick under the hull.

Nobody called it a miracle. The skipper hung the cross back on its nails and asked for his tea. Sanna said only that wood remembers where it grew, and that a thing carried carefully is never carried in vain. The cross still hangs above the stove, and the rivets still shine where her rag has been.