Realism tattoo of a wooden cross wrapped in a crown of thorns and a draped purple cloth, with stones and nails at the base, on a lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Wooden cross with thorns and purple cloth on a calf

Realism · Other · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a large wooden cross with visible wood grain, a crown of thorns circling its upper arm, and a purple cloth draped diagonally over the crossbeam and down the upright. Shading is soft and detailed, with highlights and cast shadows giving the wood and fabric depth, and small stones and nails sit in dark earth at the base. The wood and thorns are in grey and brown tones, while the cloth is the main area of colour, set against a dark background.

Realism Other Cross Wood Stone Nail

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, and mind the cat, she likes the warm end of the settle. You'll want the story of the cross on the tip above Dunmere Row, because my father hauled the timber up that hill himself and never once let anybody forget it.

Keep reading

It was the spring of the Hollin Pit disaster. Six o'clock came and the cage stayed down. By dusk the women were stood at the pit head in their shawls, and nobody would go home. Bessie Carrow fetched her good purple Sunday shawl, the one she sang in at chapel, and walked up to the gates and said, that's for them, and nobody argued with her.

Dad and four others took the old pit props from the shuttered engine house, because they were the sound oak, and stood them up in the field. He drove every nail with his own hand, and one bent, which he swore was the Lord's doing. The crown was no crown at all, only blackthorn cut from the lane hedge, and his palms bled through his gloves doing it. Bessie draped the cloth over the crossbeam and let it fall down the upright like water.

Then the women carried stones up from the spoil heap, one each, and set them in the dark earth at the foot, one for every man who had not come up. Eleven stones. Dad set the twelfth, a small grey one, and when they asked him why, he said it was for the boy who went down for the spare lamp and never reached the shaft. Nobody ever found out whether that boy existed. Dad always said the cross didn't need his name, only a stone to stand on.