Five glyph-style tattoo designs with captions

You will think I have gone soft in the head after the winter, but I must tell someone what the abbot made me copy. He had a box of loose vellum brought up from the crypt, sheets curling like dead leaves, and on each was a column of hooked and slanting signs that nobody in the house could read. Brother Oswy swears they are the letters the angels used to name the stars. I say they are the letters a clerk invents when he is bored and wants to frighten the novices.

I worked them out by lamplight over six nights, which was the only way to keep the cold out of my fingers. The trick was the hand, not the alphabet. Every sign has one heavy stroke that will not lift from the page, and once I stopped trying to draw the shapes and simply let the pen stay down, the words opened like a lock. The first line I read aloud in the chapter house was a shopping list: salt, two candles, a new hinge for the scullery door.

Brother Oswy was not comforted. He carried the sheets to the abbot that same evening, and by morning the box had gone back down to the crypt, locked, with the abbot's own seal across the hasp. I asked what the last sheet said, the one I had not finished. He would only say it was a name, and that I should not try to read it again.

I have not been back to the crypt. But tonight, from my cell, I can hear the bell-rope creak, and I keep thinking of those heavy strokes that never leave the page, and the name I did not finish.