Black script lettering arranged in the shape of a cross on a white background, a lettering design with no body placement shown.

Cross-shaped script lettering design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A black script lettering design on a plain white background, with short lines of text stacked vertically and widened at the centre to form a cross shape. The lines are set in a flowing copperplate-style script with fine, even strokes and no shading. The final line is in Latin, and the composition is centred and symmetrical with generous white space around the text.

Lettering Cross Script Text Lettering Latin phrase Calligraphy

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer the stove, lad, and mind the coal dust on that bench. Our Evan cut the first line of that hymn into the chapel lintel the winter the Ffynnon flooded, and he'd not let the minister tell him what it meant. Shepherds, he said. We're shepherds with lamps in our caps, and the dark is the flock.

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Forty-one men were underground that February. The water came up the old drift like it had been waiting for someone to leave a door open. Evan's brother was on the lower level with the ponies. Evan went down the rescue shaft with a rope round his chest and the hymn sheet folded in his cap, and he sang the words down the speaking tube so the men below could find the tune and follow it to the shaft foot. Power hath descended, he sang, from thy hand. We shall flow forth to thee.

Thirty-eight came up. Three did not, and Evan never went down again, though he sat at the pit head every shift after, counting the cages in and out the way a shepherd counts sheep at dusk. When he died the chapel wanted the whole hymn cut into the stone. His widow said no, only the last line, the Latin, in his own hand. The mason copied it off a bit of slate she kept under the Bible, and it's still legible if you know where to look.

Go on, lad, count the names on that board with me. Thirty-eight came up, and one more for Evan, who sang them home.