Black and grey Roman numeral tattoo on a forearm beside a fine serif lettering tattoo on another forearm, outdoors in green grass.

Matching Roman numeral and lettering forearm tattoos

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two people stand close together outdoors, one arm wrapped around the other person's waist and their hands clasped. A bold black Roman numeral design reading VIII X XIII runs along one forearm, with solid, crisp linework. On the other forearm, several lines of small black serif lettering run down the arm, too fine to read reliably in this photo.

Lettering Forearm Roman numeral Lettering Text Couple Tree Grass

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer the fire, the peat's nearly spent and I'll not tell this twice. You'll have walked past the chandlery on Scarrow Quay, the one with the lintel that reads eight, ten and thirteen in letters so old the rain has softened their edges. Every boat coming in on a falling tide sees them before anything else, and every child in Scarrow has asked what they mean. Maddox Pell never told a soul, not even Ada Lowe, who minded his counter for six summers.

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She had her own theories. She said they were the price of a barrel of salt in some year of his father's, or the house number of a sweetheart he'd left behind in Penzance. He only smiled and went down to the harbour wall each morning with a lead line and a ledger, sounding the bar and writing each figure in small, careful script beneath the ruled lines. Nobody bothered to read that script. It was a tide table for one channel only, and he knew it by heart.

The February the herring failed, the Mary Dunn went out for one last haul and the bar shifted in the night. Maddox stood on the wall with his lead line and called the soundings to the shore in a voice that carried over the wind. Eight fathoms. Ten. Then thirteen, and the boat came over the bar on the flood with every man alive aboard. Ada understood then that the numbers were never an address. They were the depths he had sworn to keep, for her and for anyone who needed them.

He married her the following spring, and they had the three numbers cut above the door so no one would forget the channel. The night he died, she sat with the ledger and found on the last page one line in his hand: Come home on the flood, Ada. I will be sounding.