Black ink cross and Roman numerals tattooed on a forearm, with a watch and beaded bracelet on the wrist.

Black cross and Roman numerals on forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a man sitting on a paved surface, with a black ink cross and partial Roman numerals tattooed on the inner lower forearm. The cross has bold, solid black lines and the numerals are set in a simple serif style. The image is in natural daylight and the only colour comes from the skin, denim and white sneakers, so the tattoo is black ink only.

Lettering Forearm Cross Roman numeral Watch Sneaker Denim

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Thornbury Market had wound the Corn Exchange clock since Walter Pike went into the infirmary, so on the third Tuesday of November Ada Sowerby climbed the forty-one stone steps with a tin of paraffin and a borrowed key, and found me sitting on the bell frame with a flask of cocoa, arguing with the pigeons.

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"You'll not stop it," she said. "The whole town sets its tea by that face." I told her I had no intention of stopping anything. The escapement had a tooth worn to a shark's grin, and the hands had run slow since the summer, a minute lost each day, so that by autumn the market women were missing their buses and blaming the council. Walter had kept it true with a rag, a feeler gauge and a stubbornness nobody admired. I had his gauge in my coat pocket and the numerals still to clean.

The numerals were the hard part. Each was a foot high and painted on black glass, and the gilt had flaked from the eleven and the four so that they read like a drunk's signature. I went down the ladder one rung at a time with a soft brush, and Ada held the lamp and talked about her husband's ash cross, the way he carried it up from the parish church every Ash Wednesday, lines black as a stovepipe, as if he were signing for something. She said the clock had been his father's too, and that nobody ever asked whether a clock was honest, only whether it was on time.

At four I set the minute hand to the chime of the wireless. Ada went home with cocoa down her coat. The face gave a long iron hum, and the twelve hung there reading true for the first time since August. Below us the market women checked the tower, swore at their watches, and went on with their shopping, none of them looking up.