Black lettering tattoo of an infinity symbol made from Roman numerals, sitting on the upper arm.

Infinity symbol of Roman numerals on arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo forms an infinity symbol, with Roman numerals set along both loops and crossing at the centre. The numerals are solid black in a clean, even typeface, and the shading is minimal, with no greys beyond the ink itself. The image is a close, straight-on photograph of the arm against a pale skin tone and a plain background.

Lettering Upper arm Infinity symbol Roman numeral Numeral

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dennis had kept the lifts at Harcourt House for thirty-one years, and in all that time he had never once seen a resident look up at the brass plates. They were Roman numerals, screwed to the doors by a council man who had liked his own handwriting, so the seventh floor read VII and the landing beyond it read VIII where the stairwell doubled back on itself. Nobody complained. People pressed the button, watched the arrow, and got where they were going.

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On the Tuesday the contractor sent a young engineer with a clipboard and a torch, and Dennis walked him round the building the way he walked everyone round it. They started at the bins, climbed the east stair, crossed the bridge on the sixth floor, and came down the west stair to the bins again. The engineer kept saying the layout was a figure of eight. Dennis said it was a lemniscate, a word his late wife had found in a crossword and wouldn't let him forget, and that the council had never meant it to loop, only to save on concrete.

The engineer wanted the plates replaced with digital panels. Dennis said nothing for a while, then took him up to the roof, where the wind came off the car park and the blocks on the estate stood in a long row like numbered sentences. He pointed out the old flats that had been knocked through, the ones still lit at night, and the stairwell that ran round to meet itself. Nothing up there was ever where you expected it to be, he said, but if you kept going round, you always arrived.

The plates stayed. The engineer signed the report with a note in the margin that Dennis could read from across the desk: keep the numerals, they are the only thing in the building that tells the truth about its own shape.