Black ink tattoo on a lower leg showing the numbers 13.1 and 26.2 with tally marks, plus 50, 100 and Tri in a handwritten lettering style.

Race distance tally on a lower leg

Lettering · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows the numbers 13.1 and 26.2 followed by groups of vertical tally marks, with the numbers 50, 100 and the word Tri written beneath them. The lettering and tally strokes are drawn in a simple, hand-written black line with solid, even ink. The design is shown in close, straight-on framing across a lower leg against plain skin.

Lettering Calf Tally marks Number

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chalk never survived the rain, so I kept the count on the footbridge rail at Llanfach with a bent nail, one scratch for every runner through the gate. Nine years of Sunday halves and marathons were stacked there in grey paint and bare wood, the half-distance on the left, the full on the right, and at the far end the long loops that only a handful of people had ever come home from.

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Rhodri ran the Tri from the reservoir and thought my separate column was daft. Same swimmers, he said, same bikes, same mud in the same lane. I told him they were three different people by the time they reached the bridge, and he rolled his eyes the way he did when I was right. He had the stopwatch. I had the nail, and the nail did not lie.

The morning the timing mat went under the flood, I counted by shouting. Rhodri bawled the numbers off his clipboard, I scored them into the wood, and somewhere past forty I lost my place and had to ask a woman in a yellow vest whether it was the fiftieth or the fifty-first who had just gone by. She laughed and said she was only the fiftieth, and that was the one that mattered to her. I scratched it in anyway.

The last finisher came through at dusk, a lad limping on a split lace, and he stopped at the bridge to read the rail as if it were a noticeboard. Then he held out his hand for the nail. I gave it to him. He made one small stroke beneath the hundred without a word and walked on towards the car park with his shoe flapping.