Small black serif capital letters tattooed on the inner wrist, resting on a patterned fleece and a yellow blanket.

Small Greek capital lettering on wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small, solid black tattoo of capital letters in a serif style sits across the inner wrist and forearm. The linework is clean and the letters are filled without shading. The arm rests on a black, white and pink patterned fleece over a yellow blanket, with a dim, blurred background.

Lettering Forearm Lettering Word Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pull that stool closer and mind the draught from the shutter, because the snow has buried the lane and nobody leaves before Tuesday. You want to hear about Ansel Crowe, the stonemason from Hebden? Then hush and listen. He had a habit of carving one word over every door he finished, and the word was TELOS, which the schoolmaster told him meant end.

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Ansel did not care for schoolmasters. He cut the letters square and deep into lintels from the Caldercloud quarry, and each one took him a month of Sundays. Folk asked why he troubled himself with a word nobody could read, and he would only say that every thing has a telos, a purpose that is also its finish, and a door that does not know where it leads is not worth passing through.

The winter the river froze, a widow named Mabel Pinder climbed the hill with a pair of wet gloves and a bill she could not pay. She wanted the word cut over her husband's gate. Ansel asked her what the gate had been for, and she could not say. So he sat with her three evenings by the stove, listening, until she had told him everything the man ever built, and on the fourth morning he cut the letters in a single clean stroke, no shading, no flourish.

When the thaw came, she found the last letter was not finished at all. He had left a small gap in the final stroke, just wide enough for a person to step through, so the word read end while the gate read begin again. Ansel was gone by spring, and nobody in Hebden has been able to tell me where.