Black and grey photo of a small serif Roman numeral IV tattoo centred on the back of a person's neck, with hair tied up in a bun.

Roman numeral IV on the back of the neck

Lettering · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows the back of a person's neck and upper shoulders, with hair gathered up in a bun and the face out of frame. A small Roman numeral IV in a serif typeface sits at the centre of the nape, drawn in solid black ink with clean, even strokes. The image is black and white and the composition is tightly framed on the tattoo, with soft light on the skin.

Lettering Neck Roman numeral Numeral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Edie had the ladder against the church wall before the vicar was out of bed. The clock on St Aldred's had been losing time since the February gales, and the fourth numeral on the face had worked loose from its iron ring and hung by a single screw, turning slowly whenever the wind came round from the fens.

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Up in the belfry the air smelled of pigeon and machine oil. Her uncle's spanner knocked against her hip as she climbed. She worked the screw out with fingers gone numb and the IV dropped into her palm, cold and heavier than it looked, its black paint chipped where the rain had got beneath it. Below, Market Hollow was waking: the milk float whining over the cobbles, a dog barking at the butcher's shutter, the first Lincoln bus grinding its gears by the war memorial.

She could have fitted the numeral back and gone down to her tea. Instead she sat on the ledge with it in her lap and thought about the man who had painted the originals in 1911. Someone had scratched his initials under the VI, small and careful, and in forty years nobody had thought to read them aloud. Edie's name was not on anything in this town except the school register and a ration book.

She screwed the IV back on as tight as her uncle had taught her, then waited. At four o'clock, when the hands reached it, the clock struck and the numeral stood true against the grey sky. She walked home with the spanner in one pocket and the screw she had saved in the other, which was the only part of the town's time that was hers to keep.