Black and grey realism tattoo of a wooden cross with a candle on top and a ribbon reading In Memory of Those I've Lost, on the side of the ribs.

Wooden cross with candle and memorial ribbon

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A wooden cross with a lit candle on its upper end sits at the centre of the design, with a ribbon wrapped diagonally around the upright and crossbar. The ribbon carries the script words In Memory of Those I've Lost, and the wood grain and ribbon folds are shaded with soft grey gradients and fine dark linework. The tattoo is shown in black and grey on a close, straight-on view of the side of the torso.

Realism Lettering Ribs Cross Candle Ribbon Wood Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The timber came ashore the morning after the Ruth Anne went down, a plank of oak as long as a man, grey with salt and pitted by worms. Hannah Pell found it on the shingle below the net sheds and dragged it up the slip by herself, because nobody else in Coldharbour would touch anything from the sea that week.

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She made a cross of it with her brother's adze and a borrowed saw. The crossbar she cut from a broken rib of the same boat. She bored a hole in the top, set a tallow candle into it and lit it, and the village came down to see what the widow was about. Her hands did not shake. She told them she would keep it burning until every name on the harbour wall had been read aloud at its foot. She wound a strip of sailcloth round the upright and painted on it the words she meant to say over the dead: In Memory of Those We've Lost.

There were nineteen names cut in the stone above the quay, and each dusk the parish clerk stood at the cross and read one of them out loud. Each night the candle guttered in the wind off the bar, and each night Hannah trimmed the wick and went home to a kitchen where the bread went stale on the table. The tide turned and turned again.

On the nineteenth night the clerk read the last name and then stopped, because the flame had burned down to a stub no longer than a thumb and yet it still stood straight in air that should have bent it. Hannah lifted the candle from its socket and laid it across the crossbar. The sailcloth ribbon slackened on the wood, and the wind off the bar came up the slip and carried it away. Nobody in Coldharbour ever lit that cross again, and nobody thought it needed lighting.