Black ink Roman numeral lettering in five lines, with hyphens between the numerals, tattooed on an upper arm.

Roman numeral dates on upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

Five lines of Roman numerals separated by hyphens are set in a clean, upright typeface in black ink. The numerals are drawn with fairly even, medium-weight strokes and form a neat rectangular block on smooth, light skin. A dark top sits at the upper left of the frame, and the plain light background keeps the focus on the tattoo.

Lettering Upper arm Roman numeral Date Numeral Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Marjorie Penhallow had the pen uncapped before the bride reached the font, because the vicar had once told her that Roman numerals in the back of a register outlast the ink on everything else. She was squaring the flower ledger when Tom Eastry came in out of the drizzle with a cardboard folder under his arm and the look of a man who had lost a bet.

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"Five dates," he said, setting the folder on her desk. "She wants them written out properly. Letters, not the sums."

Inside was a single sheet in his careful capitals. The thirteenth of May, two thousand and seven, the afternoon he fell off a bicycle outside the Co-op and she stopped to ask if he was dead or just embarrassed. The twenty-second of February, two thousand and ten, the night the bakery on Fore Street burned and they stood in the car park sharing a bag of cold rolls. The sixth of April, the eighteenth of September, and the twelfth of April, each one with a note in the margin in a different pen.

Marjorie had written ten thousand dates by hand in forty years, and she still counted the strokes under her breath. XIII, V, MMVII. Each letter had to stand upright, neither leaning on its neighbour nor pulling away from it. Tom watched her hand move and said nothing, which she counted in his favour.

When the register was done she wrote the last line a second time in the margin, small enough that no one would notice unless they were looking for it. Then she handed Tom the pen and told him to sign beneath it, and he did, and the rain kept falling on the churchyard as if it had all the time in the world.