Two matching black lettering tattoos of a Roman numeral date run along the fingers of a woman's hand and a man's hand resting together.

Matching Roman numeral date tattoos on fingers

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two hands rest on a pale surface, with a woman's hand with light pink nails resting over a man's hand. Each hand has a thin black Roman numeral date tattoo running along one finger, in a clean, even serif-style lettering. The image is evenly lit with soft colour, and the composition is close and centred on the hands, with a silver ring and bangle visible on the woman's wrist and hand.

Lettering Fine line Hand Roman numeral Date Matching tattoo Couple Finger Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The order came in on a Tuesday, pencilled on the back of a bus timetable: one date, two slate tiles, each no wider than a thumbnail, and the numerals cut in Roman capitals with serifs, nothing fancy. Aldous Penhale read it twice at the bench, then put the kettle on, because a man who has cut letters into Cotswold stone for thirty years knows that the plainest orders are the ones that make his hand shake.

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He ruled the tiles with a steel rule and a sharpened H pencil, working out the spacing by eye. XIV, then the first point, then II, then the second point, then MMXII. The V in XIV he cut as two strokes, never one, because a single stroke looks like a mistake when it is small enough to hold between finger and thumb. He used the fine chisel and tapped it with a mallet no heavier than a hen's egg, and when the dust settled the two tiles looked less like jewellery and more like something a clerk might have stamped on a ledger in 1912.

The customer came back alone a week later and asked whether the second tile could be made smaller. Penhale said it could not, not without the letters crowding each other, and the man nodded as though he had expected that answer. He said that the lady had picked the design from a sheet of Trajan capitals in a dusty book, and that she had laughed when she found the date already spelled out in the shop's index.

Penhale wrapped both tiles in tissue, leaving a gap between them the width of a fingernail, and told the man to keep them apart until he was ready to put them together. He wrote the job into the book as finished, then added in pencil beside it: room enough for a thumb to rest against.