Close-up of a fine line script tattoo of the word tetelestai in black ink on the upper arm, with a striped top visible at the edge of the frame.

Tetelestai script on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A single word, tetelestai, is written in thin, flowing black script across the outer upper arm. The linework is fine and even, with small loops and a long tail on the final letters, and the ink is solid black with no shading. The skin is a warm tone against a pale tiled wall and a black and white striped top, with the word running horizontally across the centre of the frame.

Fine line Lettering Upper arm Word Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom, The Gull's Rest is quiet again. Mr Abernethy left on the Tuesday coach with his trunk strapped to the roof and his bill settled to the penny, which is more than I can say for the last three. He had taken the back room over the scullery in March and never once complained about the damp or the gulls. What he did do, every evening, was sit at the kitchen table with a pencil and a sheet of blue paper, working out sums in a hand so small I had to hold it to the lamp.

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On his last morning he brought the paper down to me, folded in four. The sums were all crossed through, and across the bottom, in capitals that leaned like a man walking into the wind, he had written one Greek word and underlined it twice. I asked him what it meant. He said it was what a fellow in the Bible wrote on a debt once it was cleared, the word that meant the thing was paid and nothing more was owing. I told him we had no need of Greek at the Gull's Rest, only shillings, and he laughed and set two half-crowns down beside it.

I have kept the paper in the drawer with the rent book. When the wind comes round to the east and the sea gets up against the groyne, I take it out and read that one word over, which is longer than anything I would have bothered to write. I still don't know what he owed or to whom. You never could tell with lodgers, and I have stopped trying to.

Your loving mother, Ivy