Close-up of a black fine lettering tattoo reading XI·V·MMXII in Roman numerals on the inner wrist, partly covered by a gold watch strap and bangles.

Roman numeral lettering on the inner wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a close-up of the inner wrist with the Roman numerals XI·V·MMXII set in a single line, separated by middle dots. The characters have clean, solid black outlines with some soft shading, and the design sits across the wrist with a gold watch strap and bangles partly covering it. The image is warm in tone with a metallic gold and silver background, and the tattoo is the only ink in the frame.

Lettering Forearm Roman numeral Numeral Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Pardoe came in on a Tuesday with a folded paper and a sixpence she had been carrying in her glove for a week. She wanted the date cut small, no bigger than a thumbnail, and in Roman figures, because her husband had always said the Romans built things to last and that was what he wanted from a stone. I told her Roman figures take more chisel work than plain ones. She said she had waited forty years to hear the price of anything and would not mind paying it now.

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The paper had the numbers written in pencil: the eleventh, the fifth, and the year 2012. I asked whether it was for a grave. She said no, it was the day the lock at Hebden had been reopened after the flood, the day she and her husband had gone down the cut in a borrowed barge with a basket of bread and nobody else on the water. Her grandson, she said, would have it inked on his inner wrist if he had any sense. I thought that a daft idea for a stonecutter's family, and she laughed and said he was the sensible one of the lot.

I set the marks on a scrap of slate first. Each stroke of the X and the I wants its own patience, and the middle dots I made with a point no thicker than a pin. When she held the slate up to the window, the light came through the thin places and she said it looked like something that had been there before the village.

She left the slate on my bench and took the proper stone away in a blanket. I kept the scrap. Years on, when the sun comes low across the yard, I still see the numerals sitting in their neat row, dots between them like full stops on a telegram, and I think the date was never the important part. It was the nerve to put it somewhere you could not lose it.