Two pairs of hands held palm up on a beach show matching black fine serif Roman numeral lettering tattoos reading VIII IV XII on the inner wrists.

Roman numeral wrist tattoos on a beach

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

Two pairs of hands are held palm up in front of a sea and sand backdrop, with one pair clasped together. Each inner wrist carries the same black Roman numeral tattoo, VIII IV XII, set in a clean serif lettering style with crisp, even strokes. The black and white photograph is framed closely on the wrists and palms, with the sea and sand softly blurred behind.

Lettering Other Roman numeral Numeral Hand Wrist Beach Sea

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on Scarrow Quay trusted the town clock after the winter it lost four minutes to the gulls. So when Ada Pellow's father nailed a brass plate beside the pier gate and scratched three numerals into it, the fishermen took it for a joke and set their watches by it anyway. VIII IV XII, he told her. Eight past four on the twelfth. That was the hour the Marion went down off the Ness, and he had been meaning to say it aloud for thirty years.

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Ada was eleven that spring and did not understand why a man would carve a time into metal and then refuse to explain it. She learnt the rest from Mrs Tregenza at the chandlery, who said the twelfth had been a Thursday, that the boat had come home that evening anyway with her crew asleep in the bilge, and that nobody had ever told the widow which of the two was the miracle.

Her father kept walking to the plate each morning at eight. He did not stop to read it. He touched the brass with two fingers, the way you check a hot kettle, and went on down the slip to his nets. Ada began to do the same, and then to wait there after he had gone, counting the gulls, until the tide came over the stones and wet her shoes.

The last time she stood there, the sun was low and the water flat, and it came to her that the numerals were not a time at all but a way of setting something right side up. Eight, four, twelve. She put her palm to the cold plate and, for the first time, felt it was warm.