Black hand-drawn lettering design of phrases arranged in the shape of a cross, shown as a flash-style tattoo design on a white background.

Text cross lettering design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows a cross made from stacked lines of uppercase text in varied hand-drawn typefaces, with lines of different sizes and weights. The linework is solid black on a plain white background with no shading. The phrases are centred and form a vertical and horizontal cross shape, filling the frame from top to bottom.

Lettering Cross Text Quote Lettering Life

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The master wanted the lettering square and deep, so that rain would sit in the grooves and make the words read dark even at noon. I had cut eleven stones for him that spring, all for the dead of our street, and I had learned to hate the sound of my chisel on the soft limestone from the eastern quarry. Each stroke rang like a bell struck too close to the ear.

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The stone that came to me in the month of barley was different. A widow named Thekla brought a wax tablet with the words scratched into it, and she would not say who they were for. She only asked that I cut them in a column, short lines above long ones, so that someone standing at the foot of the slab would read downward and then across, and find the thing crossing itself where the lines met.

I worked five days. On the fourth, my lamp guttered out in the middle of an upright stroke and I had to finish by feel, my thumb running along the cut to check the depth. When the sun came through the gap in the roof the next morning, the lines I had cut in shadow caught the light and burned white, and I understood why she had wanted them stacked that way. The longest word sat at the crossing, and the light fell straight down onto it.

Thekla paid me in oil and salt and did not look at the stone for long. She laid her palm flat on the crossing word, as though checking it for warmth, then walked out into the street with her shawl pulled over her hair. I still have the wax tablet. The letters are shallow, and anyone can read them if they hold it up to a window.