Five cross shapes recur on our jewelry: the Latin cross, the crucifix, the cross pattée, the budded cross and the lily-tipped cross. These are the types of crosses behind the pieces in this guide, and the cross pattée is the shape of the iron cross. They come as .925 sterling silver rings, pendants, earrings and rosaries made by manufacturers in Thailand, plus bishop rings, some of them with crosses on the shoulders. Most of our cross buyers are men, bikers and rockers, buying for themselves.
Our cross rings, cross pendants and crucifix pendants collections hold 106 designs on sale today, and customers bought 579 pieces from them in the two years to October 2026. Gift orders come around Father's Day, Christmas and birthdays: children buying for their fathers at Father's Day and Christmas, and women buying for a boyfriend's birthday.
Five Types of Crosses You'll Find on Our Jewelry
Each of these cross types has a short definition you can check against the piece in your hand. The table pairs each one with pieces from our catalog; the weights come from our product pages, where we list what each piece weighed on our scale.
| Shape | How to spot it | Our pieces |
|---|---|---|
| Latin cross | The upright is crossed near the top by a shorter bar, so the lower arm is the longest. | Gothic knight's cross pendant, 16 g, 31 × 52 mm; small tribal cross pendant, 4 g, 18 × 29 mm |
| Crucifix | A cross with the figure of Christ on it. | Silver crucifix pendant, 10 g, 27 × 60 mm; wood and silver crucifix, 14 g; two crucifix rings with a 25 × 32 mm face, 16 g and 20 g |
| Cross pattée (the iron cross) | Four arms, narrow at the center and widening toward the ends; in the usual form the ends are cut straight across. | Iron cross ring, 25 g; iron cross spinner ring, 19 g; iron cross pendant, 18 g; iron cross studs, 3 g a pair, whose ends curve inward (see below) |
| Budded cross (cross bottony) | Each arm ends in three round buds, like a clover leaf. | Shield-faced Celtic cross ring, 13 g, 14 × 15 mm face |
| Lily-tipped cross (cross fleury) | Each arm ends in a fleur-de-lis. | Shield of faith ring, 40 g, 28 × 32 mm face |
One name in that table needs a warning. A Celtic cross, in the dictionary sense, has a ring around the point where the arms meet, a form many of Ireland's stone high crosses carry; Ireland's heritage service dates the high crosses to about AD 800 to 1150. Our shield-faced Celtic cross ring has no ring. It's a budded cross, and its product page says so.
Our Celtic cross band ring has no ring either; its cross has plain, equal arms. If it's the ringed shape you're after, look for the circle around the arms in the photos before you order.
Cross or Crucifix: What's the Difference?
The difference between a cross and a crucifix is the figure of Christ: a crucifix has it, a figure called the corpus, and a plain cross has none. Look for the figure in the product photo and you know which one you have.
Our two crucifix rings share a shield-shaped 25 × 32 mm face, with a silver figure on a gold-colored cross, but the gold comes from different metals. The crucifix biker ring has a solid brass cross; on the crucifix ring with the CZ border, the cross is gold-plated sterling. A buyer titled a five-star review of our crucifix ring "The Lord goes everywhere with me now."
Some crucifixes carry a small plaque above the head. On our wood and silver crucifix pendant it reads INRI, the initials of the Latin Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum, "Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews." John's Gospel (19:19-20) says that title was written in Hebrew, Latin and Greek.
Iron Cross or Maltese Cross? Look at the Ends of the Arms
Iron cross vs Maltese cross comes down to the ends of the arms. A Maltese cross has four V-shaped arms with notched ends, which gives it eight points; the Order of Malta still uses it. The iron cross is a cross pattée, which the Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus describes as having arms "very narrow where they meet and widening out towards the extremities"; in the usual form the ends are cut straight across. Both shapes widen toward the ends, so at a glance they're easy to confuse.
Our iron cross ring, spinner ring and pendant have straight-cut ends. The iron cross studs curve each end inward to two sharp corners, which puts them somewhere between the two shapes.
The iron cross began as a Prussian military decoration. King Frederick William III founded it during the wars against Napoleon and backdated its founding to 10 March 1813. On the king's commission, the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel made it a black iron cross pattée in a silver frame, according to a history from the German armed forces' military history center.
It was renewed in 1870 and 1914, and again in 1939, when a swastika replaced the royal initial. Since 1956 Germany's armed forces have used it, in its original pattée shape, as the recognition mark on their aircraft and combat vehicles.
That 1939 version is why some people wonder what the iron cross means today, and whether it's a hate symbol. The Anti-Defamation League, which tracks hate symbols, says neo-Nazis and other white supremacists adopted it, and also that its non-racist use "has greatly proliferated" in the United States, spreading from bikers to skateboarders. In the ADL's view, an iron cross on its own, without a swastika or other hate symbols, can't be identified as a hate symbol, though the ADL adds that care is needed to read the symbol in whatever context it turns up. No customer has ever asked us whether our iron cross pieces are one.
Our iron cross ring fills the arms of a 22 × 22 mm face with black enamel and weighs 25 grams. The spinner ring repeats the shape all around a 14 mm band whose outer section turns, and the studs set five small CZ stones in the center of a 13 × 13 mm cross. Our Knights Templar ring is a flared cross too, paved with small blue CZ stones on a 23 × 22 mm face. The 12th-century chronicler William of Tyre wrote that the Templar knights wore white mantles, and that later, it was said, knights and sergeants alike added crosses of red cloth to them; he doesn't describe the cross's shape.
Solid Brass, Gold Plating and Sterling Silver
The silver in every piece in this guide is .925 sterling, and most pieces are oxidized: blackened in the recesses so the raised parts stand out. Where a cross is gold-colored, it's either solid brass or gold plating.
Solid brass sits on two of the rings in this guide. The crusader cross ring has a raised brass cross on a 12 mm silver band engraved with lines of script, and the crucifix biker ring's crosses are brass too. Brass is an alloy of copper and zinc, and like other copper alloys it darkens over time, as the Canadian Conservation Institute notes. On both rings the brass sits on top of the silver, and the inside of the band, against your finger, is silver.
Gold plating covers the rest: the cross on the crucifix ring with the CZ border, the budded cross on our rocker cross earrings, the gold figure on our iron-cross crucifix pendant, and most of our bishop rings. Plating is a thin layer, and rubbing wears it through over time. How long that takes depends on how thick the layer is and how the piece is worn, so we can't promise a number of years. In a 2020 review, one bishop-ring buyer wrote that an earlier ring had faded so much it was turning silver.
Bishop Rings: Amethyst, CZ and Gold Plating
In the Latin Church, a ring is part of a bishop's ordination. The Catechism of the Catholic Church lists it with the Gospel book, the miter and the crosier as signs of the bishop's mission, his fidelity to the Church and his office as shepherd.
Clergy buy ours. One customer wrote in a review as a bishop-elect, pleased with "my Episcopal ring" ahead of their investiture, and another wrote that they have used one of our Celtic cross rings as their bishop's ring since their consecration.
Most of our bishop rings are gold-plated sterling silver with a large center stone; a few are plain silver, or gold only on the crosses. On the men's cross bishop ring, the best seller among the pieces in this guide with 28 sold in two years, the square purple stone is natural amethyst; the clear stones around it and in the crosses on both shoulders are cubic zirconia. Its face is ¾ inch square and it weighs about 30 grams. The amethyst gold bishop ring sets an oval natural amethyst, 18 × 20 mm, in a halo of CZ stones, with crosses cut into both shoulders, at about 22 grams.
Amethyst does have a history on bishops' rings; the Bremen Cathedral Museum holds a medieval example. We haven't found a church rule that requires amethyst, and the Catechism names no stone. Most of our other bishop rings carry amethyst too; a few use a different center stone, such as a green peridot or a red stone.
Will My Chain Fit Through the Bail?
Your chain will fit if it's thinner than the bail, the loop at the top that the chain runs through, so compare its width with the row for your pendant below. Our product pages list chains from about 2 mm on the small tribal cross up to 5 mm on the crucifix with the gold-plated figure, and a bail opening of about 6 mm on the iron cross. It's the question our cross pendant buyers ask most: my chain is so many millimeters, will it go through? Here they are, lightest to heaviest:
| Pendant | Weight | Size | Bail (from the product page) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Small tribal cross | 4 g | 18 × 29 mm | Chain up to about 2 mm |
| Silver crucifix | 10 g | 27 × 60 mm | Chain up to 2-3 mm |
| Wood and silver crucifix | 14 g | About 48 × 73 mm (1⅞ × 2⅞ in) | Chain or cord up to about 4 mm |
| Iron cross | 18 g | About 32 × 50 mm with the bail | Opening about 6 mm |
| Crucifix with gold-plated figure | 31 g | About 35 × 67 mm (1⅜ × 2⅝ in) | Chain up to 5 mm |
Where we list the opening rather than a chain width, pick a chain a little thinner than the opening. For a chain of about 5 mm, the two on this list to look at are the crucifix with the gold-plated figure and the iron cross.
Whichever end of the chain you thread through the bail has to fit through it too, so if you go in from the clasp end, check the clasp against the opening as well. None of these pendants comes with a chain, so any chain you already own will do if it clears the bail.
One buyer of the iron cross pendant wrote: "Sometimes the bail gets stuck on a tip corner but is easy to readjust."
Our rosaries are the exception, because the chain is part of the piece. The memento mori skull rosary is solid .925 silver, with skull beads running down to a 30 × 48 mm crucifix and a Miraculous Medal of the Virgin Mary where the strands meet. It comes in lengths from 21 to 30 inches.
Wide Cross Rings Fit Tight: Go One Size Up
A lot of our cross rings have wide bands: 12 mm on the crusader cross ring, 14 mm on the iron cross spinner, 16 mm on the cut-out cross ring. A wide band covers more of the finger, so it usually fits snugger than a slim band of the same size. Customers used to find that our wide rings fit smaller than the size they had ordered.
So on wide designs we tell customers to go one size up. It's the same rule as in our ring size guide: if the band is wider than 6 mm, order one full size above what you measured.
Can You Wear a Cross If You're Not Religious?
Yes: you can wear a cross as a piece of jewelry, for the look, whether or not you're Christian. Customers do ask us this, and that's our answer. It's a shop's answer about jewelry, not a ruling from any church.
Rosaries are a different case. The closest rule in the Catholic Church's canon law is canon 1171: sacred objects designated for divine worship by dedication or blessing are to be treated with reverence and not put to profane or inappropriate use, even when a private person owns them. It doesn't mention rosaries or necklaces.
In a 2011 answer on wearing a rosary as a necklace, the liturgy professor Fr Edward McNamara wrote that the canon probably doesn't fully apply to rosaries, but that wearing one merely as jewelry wouldn't be respectful, while wearing one as a statement of faith is fine. If you're buying a rosary for someone who prays with one, that's worth knowing.
Care for Silver, Brass and Wood
Wipe the silver with the polishing cloth that comes with every jewelry order, using light pressure on the raised parts. Take your pieces off for the shower, the pool and the sea: moisture speeds up tarnish, and chlorinated water and salt water are harder on silver. The black in the recesses is the oxidized finish. It fades slowly with long wear, and a silver dip would strip it off along with any tarnish, so stick to the cloth.
On the wood crucifix, use the cloth on the silver only; it carries a polishing abrasive, so keep it off the wood. Between wears, put each piece back in its pouch so it doesn't rub against other jewelry; our silver care guide covers tarnish in more detail.
Ready to choose a cross style? Check the band width or the bail before you order, and if it's a crucifix you want, start with our crucifix pendants.