Small black serif numerals reading 9 and 3/4 tattooed on an ankle, with white trainers visible below.

9 3/4 numerals on an ankle

Lettering · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small, solid black tattoo of the numerals 9 and 3/4 sits on the side of an ankle, with the 3 and 4 stacked as a fraction beside the 9. The linework is clean and even, with black ink only and no shading beyond the solid strokes. The photograph has a warm, faded tone, and the white trainers and laces fill the lower part of the frame.

Lettering Ankle Numeral Number

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody at Calder Junction believed in the half-platform until the signal box was repainted and the painter found a brass plate screwed under the bench: NINE AND THREE QUARTERS, 1911. I was lost property clerk then, which meant every odd thing the line couldn't account for landed on my shelves. By March I had a cricket bat, a birdcage with no bird in it, and a wedding veil still pinned to its tissue paper.

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The trouble was that the half-platform only ran on Tuesdays, and only for people carrying something they had forgotten they'd lost. Mr Okonedo, who ran the urn in the waiting room, swore he watched a woman in a green mackintosh step off the 4.10 onto nothing at all and vanish somewhere between the second and third pillars. I wrote it in the book, because that is what the book is for. The brass plate went missing the same week.

A parcel came in April, addressed to the clerk of the half-platform, with no postmark. Inside was a tin of cocoa, a ticket dated for a train that had been cancelled in 1952, and a note in pencil: keep the gate open for the late ones. I did. I stood by the pillars on Tuesday evenings with the lamp lit and the kettle going, and most nights nothing happened.

On the last Tuesday in June the steam from Okonedo's urn drifted sideways across the empty track, towards the pillars, as if someone had walked through it. Somewhere beyond the buffers a bell rang for three-quarters of a second, and then the line was quiet again, and I wrote the time down.