Black Roman numerals in a fine line lettering style tattooed along the side of two fingers, one on each of two hands.

Roman numeral finger tattoos on two hands

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two hands rest close together, each with a row of black Roman numerals inked along the side of a finger. The numerals are thin, crisp and evenly spaced, with no shading. The image is a close, slightly angled photo with a blurred background of everyday items, and the ink is the main focus.

Lettering Fine line Hand Roman numeral Numeral Lettering Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fair came into Coldharbour every spring on the third Tuesday, and every spring the old carousel had to be counted before it could turn. Bess Tallow did the counting. She had a stub of blue pencil and a ledger with a cracked spine, and she wrote the horses down one by one, the lions, the swans, the grey mare with the chipped ear, until the total reached XXII and the organ could be wound.

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The year the rain came sideways, a boy called Tobias Flint turned up at the gate with a canvas bag of spanners and no fare. He said he could mend anything with gears in it. Bess told him the carousel had gears enough to eat a boy whole, and he laughed and crawled under the platform into the mud. He counted the teeth on every cog aloud, the way his grandmother had taught him, and when his hands were too oily to hold the pencil he wrote the sums on his own fingers in ink from the cart, so he would not lose them.

By the end of the week the horses turned. Bess wrote the new total in her ledger, and beneath it, in her own neat hand, the year and the day. Tobias copied his numbers beside hers, the same numbers in the same order, as though one count could not be finished without the other. He held his hand up to the lamp so she could check them, and she did, twice, and found them right.

The fair left Coldharbour at dawn on the Sunday. Bess never found the boy again, though she looked at every gate in every spring for thirty years. The organ still plays one tune too many when the carousel starts, and the children who ride the swans say the old mechanic under the platform is counting them, very quietly, in the old way.