Purple brush lettering of the word Tetelestai written over a faint grey pencil cross on pale paper.

Tetelestai lettering with a pencil cross

Lettering · Colour · Flash

A hand-drawn design of the word Tetelestai in purple brush-style script, with fine hairline strokes extending from several letters. A pale grey pencil cross sits behind the word, with faint sketch marks visible in the background. The lettering is bold and fluid on a light green-cream paper, with the cross providing a muted, centred frame.

Lettering Cross Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Maud Thackery had kept the walled garden at Lowther Hollow for forty-one years, and in all that time the south wall had never been finished. Every spring she repointed the bricks, and every autumn the frost lifted them loose again. The steward's boy said it was the wall's nature to stay unfinished. Maud said that was the sort of talk that let men off their work.

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The winter the squire died, she took the last of the lime and a trowel with a cracked handle and went to the gap beside the pear tree. She worked by lamplight for nine nights. On the tenth morning she stood back, wiped her hands on her apron, and found she could not think what to do next. Her mother had always said a job was done when you could walk away from it without looking back.

So she walked. At the gate she turned once and saw the wall standing straight in the grey light, the pear branches laid over the top of it like a hand. The old priest had used a Greek word at the end of every service, the one that meant the thing was accomplished, and she said it aloud now, badly, the way she had never dared before. The sparrows went up off the hedge in a clatter.

The next spring the steward's boy came running to say the heir wanted the south wall pulled down for a glasshouse. Maud sent him back with a message: the wall was already finished, and if the young man wanted a glasshouse he could build it over her grave, since she had no plans to move from her bed by the gate.