Black line drawing sheet of nine Christian symbols combining alpha, omega, chi rho, crosses and a crown, with a caption under each design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Alpha, omega and chi rho symbol sheet

Black and grey · Flash

A sheet of nine black outline drawings of Christian symbols, each labelled in small capitals beneath. The designs combine the Greek letters alpha and omega with chi rho monograms, tau and Latin crosses, and a crown. The linework is uniform and open, with no shading and no colour, laid out in a three by three grid on a white background.

Cross Crown Monogram Symbol

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The king's man came up to the quarry in the third week of frost, turning his hat in his hands, and asked Brannoc to cut the chapel lintel again. The old letters were too thin, he said. The crown the king had commissioned from the goldsmiths of Vell would sit better above them if the stone beneath were deeper and plainer. Brannoc had cut those letters himself forty years before, when the chapel was new and the king was a boy who could not yet lift a sword. Alpha on the left, omega on the right, and between them a cross whose upright ran long into the stone, as if it meant to go on past the wall.

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'Where is the king's name?' the man asked, looking along the lintel as though it might be hidden in the grain. 'There is none,' said Brannoc. 'There is the beginning and the end, and the thing that crosses them. Anyone who needs a name can read it from the shape.' The man frowned, wrote something in his ledger, and went back down the road. Brannoc cut the new letters over the old, the way his master had taught him, so that a mason who came after would know the first hand had been true.

The crown went up in spring, gilded and heavy, and for a season the people of Vell said the lintel was the finest in the kingdom. Then the wet came in through a crack the frost had opened, and the curl of the rho began to lift away from the chi. Brannoc was dead by then. His granddaughter Ysolde climbed the scaffold with a lamp and a bag of lime, and found that the old letters underneath had never been cut away, only buried, and that they were holding the stone together while the new ones slid.

She pressed the lime into the crack, then traced alpha with her thumb until its edge was sharp again. The crown stayed where the king had put it. The beginning and the end had not moved at all.