Bold black lettering reading iRun with small red 26.2 above it, tattooed on a person's upper back below a purple top strap.

iRun lettering on upper back

Lettering · Back · Mixed · Photo

A close photograph of a tattoo on the upper back, near the shoulder blade, showing the word iRun in solid black block lettering. A small red 26.2 sits above the final letters. The skin is lit softly against a dark background, with a purple top strap crossing the frame.

Lettering Back Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stencil for the Dunmere road race had cracked along its fold, so Mags taped it flat with masking tape and told me to hold it still while she read the numbers aloud. Nineteen years of painting mile markers had taught her that nobody reads a road sign for long, but everybody reads the numbers. "Twenty-six point two," she said, tapping the card with a nail. "Red for the distance. Black for the word. And don't you dare let the point look like a comma."

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We did the bridge on a Tuesday, when the tide was out and the mud on the estuary smelled of old pennies. A man in a grey fleece jogged past twice while I worked the brush into the curve of the 2. On his third pass he slowed by the railing, where Mags had already finished the black letters, and read them out under his breath as if checking a spelling. Then he laughed, not unkindly, and said it looked like a sum someone had been proud of solving.

Mags didn't look up from her tin. Her knee had stopped her running the course years ago, she'd told me on the drive out, but she still drove it every October in the van with the bad heater, stopping at each marker she'd painted to check the paint had held through the frost. "Eleven times I ran it," she said. "Never once in the top hundred. Didn't matter. The numbers were always right."

When we packed up, the red had gone tacky in the wind, and the water was creeping back over the mud in thin silver lines. Mags pressed her thumb to a corner of the 26 to test it, then wiped her hand on her overalls and said, "Good. It'll outlast us both."