Black and green tattoo of the Chi Rho monogram with Greek letters alpha and omega, framed by a laurel wreath, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Chi Rho monogram in a laurel wreath

Botanical · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large Chi Rho monogram, formed by the Greek letters chi and rho, sits at the centre of the design, with small Greek letters alpha and omega on either side. A laurel wreath with green leaves and black stems curves around the monogram. The lettering is solid black with clean edges, the leaves are shaded in green, and the tattoo is photographed against a dark sleeve on the upper arm.

Botanical Upper arm Monogram Laurel wreath Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mason at Scarrow Quay had cut the same three letters into the stern of every boat for thirty years, and nobody in the town could say what they meant, only that they kept the water civil. When the Margaret Ann went down on the Hagg Rock in the autumn gales, her widow came down to the wall with a chisel wrapped in oilcloth and asked him to do the harbour wall next.

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He refused at first. The stone was old and the frost had got into it, and he did not hold with carving what he could not read. Her son had been the one who knew the old tongue, he said, but she only shook her head and pressed the chisel into his palm. So he cut the big letters first, the chi crossing the rho like two oars laid together, then the small alpha and omega on either side, the way the chapel clerk had copied them out for him on a scrap of paper. Last he cut the wreath, bay leaves curling round the whole of it, and when he finished the light was going and his knuckles were bleeding.

Through the winter the sea took the quay a yard at a time. Storms came and went, and the lifeboat crew argued over whether the stonework was worth a second look. In spring the mason walked down with a bucket to scrub off the moss and found the wall standing square, the carved letters clean-edged as the day he left them, while the rest of the breakwater lay strewn across the shingle.

The widow never told him whether she had believed in it. She only came down each morning after that, sat on the bollard with her hands folded, and watched the boats go out past the letters and come back in again.