Black and grey lettering tattoo of camera f-stop numbers 2.8, 4, 5.6, 8, 11 and 16 in a typewriter font on the side of the body.

Camera f-stop numbers in typewriter font

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey photograph of a row of camera f-stop numbers, 2.8, 4, 5.6, 8, 11 and 16, tattooed in a typewriter-style serif font across smooth skin. The numerals are crisp, evenly spaced and solid black with no shading, and the skin is a pale, slightly warm tone. A hand with speckled nail polish rests at the top of the frame, with the tattoo centred in the lower half.

Lettering Other Numeral Typewriter font

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You learn the numbers before you learn the light. Your father chalks them on the lamp-room door in the order the ring on the lens gives them: 2.8, 4, 5.6, 8, 11, 16. Each step down the row lets half as much light through the glass, he says, so you climb the scale the way you climb the tower, one iron rung at a time, and every rung makes the picture darker and sharper.

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It is October and the fog has sat on the Skerry for four days. The relief boat cannot land, so the only ships you see are grey shapes passing at the edge of the world. He hands you the old box camera with its brass collar and asks you to photograph the lamp while it turns. Wide open, the beam blooms into a white smear and the rock vanishes into it. You stop down, and the rail comes back: the gulls on it, the rust on the bolts, the pale line where the tide has been.

On the last night before the automatic light goes in, he sets the lens himself. He does not say which number, only that the sea will be coming at them from every side and he wants all of it held. You press the shutter at sixteen while the lamp sweeps over the glass, over the boat, over the two of you leaning on the rail, and you can hear the clockwork ticking down as the beam passes.

When the print comes back from the chemist in the harbour town, the lamp is a bright thread and the sea is a flat black field, but every rung of the iron ladder is sharp, and so is the man on the top step, one hand raised to shade his eyes, as though he has only just seen you.