Black and grey circular emblem marked 42, ringed by script and stippled dotwork, with a vertical ornament above, tattooed on a person's upper back.

Circular emblem with 42 on upper back

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large circular emblem sits centre frame, with three smaller rings arranged around a central disc that reads 42. A band of looping script surrounds the emblem, and stippled dotwork fills the space between the rings and the text. A vertical chain of small ornaments runs up from the top of the design towards the neckline.

Dotwork Geometric Back Circle Script Emblem Dot Ornament Number

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The carter came up the Harrow Pass in sleet, three days behind his timetable, with a brass wheel lashed to his mule under a sheet of oilcloth. He would not let me lift the cloth. The postage had been paid in silver, he said, and the parcel was addressed to whoever kept the toll gate at the summit, which was me.

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I dragged it into the hut with the pulley and my bad knee. A band of looping script ran round the rim, hooked and tailed like a letter written in thread and then sewn shut. Inside it turned three smaller rings on a single pin, and at the centre sat a disc with 42 stamped through it. Between the rings the metal was pricked with dots, thousands of them, so that when the lamp moved the whole thing seemed to breathe. A card tied to the spindle read only: Ask it the question.

I left it alone for a week. I read the ledgers, counted mules going down to the valley and mules coming up, and watched the cloud sit on the gate. On the eighth morning the rings began to turn by themselves, slow as a sundial, and stopped each time a dot lined up with a numeral. I wrote down every stop and laid the pencil marks beside the ledger. Each sequence matched a toll I had taken at that gate, and every one of them came to the same sum.

So the question was never written down. The rings had been counting the price of getting over, and the answer stayed the same whatever you asked. I charged the carter nothing when he came back through. I hung the wheel above the stove, where the dots catch the firelight, and now anyone who asks what it means gets forty-two pence and a cup of tea.