Black and grey neo-traditional tattoo on a forearm showing a Chi-Rho monogram in a shaded circle, with alpha and omega letters, laurel leaves, berries, a crown and scrollwork.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Chi-Rho monogram with laurel on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A tattoo on the forearm shows a Chi-Rho monogram inside a circle, with the Greek letters alpha and omega beside it, surrounded by laurel leaves, berries, a small crown, a cross and curling scrollwork. The linework is bold and solid black, with grey shading on the circle and leaves that gives the central emblem a metallic look. The design is centred on the forearm against a dark background, with the composition filling most of the frame.

Neo-trad Forearm Monogram Laurel Berry Crown Cross Scrollwork Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The die had cracked along the upper arm of the rho, a hairline no one but Aurelian would have seen, and he sat with it under the lamp until the oil guttered low. Three hundred discs were owed to the bishop's steward by the Kalends. Each one needed the same circle, the same six-spoked sign, and the same laurel bending around it like a wreath laid on a tomb.

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His apprentice Tertius was grinding silver in the corner and pretending not to watch. He was fourteen and had opinions about everything, especially the little crown the steward wanted set at the top, which Tertius said looked like a bramble someone had trodden on. "It's meant to look like a crown," Aurelian said. "Ask the steward." "I asked him. He said to ask you, and you'd say the same."

Aurelian laughed despite himself and took a blank disc from the tray. He pressed it into the wax and held it up to the lamp. The alpha and omega sat on either side of the sign like two men keeping watch on a gate, the letters reading backwards in the wax as they always did. That was the trick of the trade: everything had to be made wrong in the wax before it could be made right in the silver.

"Why are they at the edges?" Tertius asked. "Why not in the middle with the rest?" Aurelian took the cracked die from the bench and turned it over in his fingers. "Because they're the ends," he said. "The beginning and the end. Everything else sits between them." Tertius considered this, then nodded at the broken die. "So that one's the middle, and it's the one that split. That's all right, then." Aurelian did not answer. He reached for the file.