Close photo of two fingers with black Roman numeral lettering tattooed along them, one finger showing a silver ring and the other a patterned band, on a brown surface.

Roman numeral tattoos on two fingers

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two fingers of a hand are shown side by side, each with a line of black Roman numerals running along the length of the digit in a serif typeface. The lettering is crisp, solid black ink with no shading, and the skin tone is natural, with silver rings worn on the hand and a brown wooden surface behind. The close, slightly angled framing keeps the focus on the lettering.

Lettering Hand Roman numeral Numeral Finger Serif lettering Date

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The grafting knife was my aunt's, and she never let anyone else sharpen it. Every August she walked the Keddle orchard with a tin of wax and a fistful of cloth tags, and every tree that took a new graft got a date written on its label in pencil, in Roman numerals, because she said the numbers on the church clock were Roman and Arabic ones looked like they were rushing somewhere.

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That summer the Bramley rows were heavy, the branches propped with forked ash poles. I was nineteen and sulky, counting windfalls into crates for the cider press. She showed me how to read the tags: II for the second year, XII for the twelfth tree in the Long Row, and the year itself, MMXI, which she insisted was the year the old damson finally fruited after a decade of doing nothing.

On the last Saturday she handed me the knife and told me to graft a cutting from the damson onto a rootstock in the shed. My hands were slick with sap and the first cut went wrong, a ragged slant that split the bark. She laughed, pressed the stem back into place with her thumb, and bound it tight with raffia. 'Mistakes take the best,' she said. 'Give it a month and you won't see the join.'

The tag still hangs from that tree, the pencil gone silver with weather. Every late August I walk the rows and read the numbers out loud the way she taught me, until the wind takes the last of them and the wasps settle on the windfalls.