Two inner wrists showing matching fine line Roman numeral tattoos, one with a small key and one with a padlock, in black ink.

Matching Roman numeral wrist tattoos

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two inner wrists are shown side by side, each with a matching line of Roman numerals in a serif lettering style. The left wrist has a small key below the text and the right has a small padlock, both drawn in fine black linework. The ink is dark and the tattoos sit centred on the wrists against a plain background of skin and denim.

Lettering Fine line Forearm Roman numeral Key Padlock Matching tattoo Wrist

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody at Hollin Colliery trusted the lamp room padlock, so the deputy kept a second key on a nail behind the pit office door. Ours were stamped with the year in Roman numerals because the foreman liked to look clever, and mine said MMX on the bow. Gwen Morris had the other one. She was the only woman on the surface shift, and she had a habit of lifting the lamps off their hooks before the men had their boots laced, counting them as if she could tell by the weight who was late.

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The night the east level flooded, the cage stalled at two hundred feet and the signal bell went quiet. Gwen came running across the yard with her key already in her fist, but the padlock had rusted and she could not turn it. I took the spare off the nail, knelt in the wet, and worked the shackle until it gave. Neither of us said a word. The lamps came out one at a time, each with its brass tag, and we counted them back in twice.

After that we swapped keys every Friday, a ritual nobody else understood. She passed hers across the bench without looking, and I passed mine back. It was the closest thing to a promise either of us had the nerve to make in a village where the coal decided everything. When the pit shut, the padlock went to a scrap man in Merthyr for a tenner, and we kept our keys.

Gwen still wears hers on a bootlace, and I carry mine on a chain in my coat pocket, the bow worn smooth by my thumb. Some evenings I hold them side by side under the kitchen light, the same year cut into both, and wait for the one thing a lock was ever really for.