Black lettering-style numerals 2, 4 and 7 with a red shaded state outline between them, tattooed in a vertical line on a forearm.

Numbers and state outline on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows the digits 2, 4 and 7 stacked vertically with a shaded state outline between the second and third numbers. The numerals have bold, slightly ornamental black outlines with dark red fill, and the outline is shaded with soft red and maroon tones. It is photographed straight on against a tiled floor, with the forearm filling most of the frame and a person's dark clothing and jeans at the left edge.

Lettering Forearm Number State outline Map

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Tarn Street could say who had first painted the number on the chandlery door, only that it had been there longer than the gas works and would outlast the lamps. Two, four, seven, stacked one above the other, with a dark wedge of land between the four and the seven that no surveyor had ever bothered to name. The old men said it was a bus route that had stopped running. The women said it was a debt. The children said it was the combination to the safe under the bar at the Crown.

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Ada Pell came down that street at eleven on a wet November night with a suitcase tied shut with string. She had not been expected. She stood beneath the painted digits and read them by the light of the one working streetlamp, and she knew what they meant, because her grandmother had told the story the way other grandmothers told of wolves. The wedge was a county on the far side of the sea, where a man had once rowed a borrowed boat with his brother's ashes in a tin. The two and the seven were the years he left and the year he came back. The four was the number of oars he had broken on the crossing.

She knocked twice, waited, then knocked four times, the way the story said. Footsteps came down the stairs slow as a tide. The bolt slid back, and a man she had never met stood in the doorway holding a cup of cold tea, his face wet with something that might have been rain. "You're seven years late," he said, and he stood aside to let her in. Behind her the streetlamp caught the string on her suitcase and made it shine like a line drawn across a map, and the door closed on the number, and the street forgot it again.