Black and white photo of two pairs of hands held up on a beach, each wrist bearing a black Roman numeral tattoo reading VIII IV XII in a lettering style.

Roman numeral wrist tattoos on two pairs of hands

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two pairs of hands are raised against a sandy beach and sea in a black and white photograph. Each wrist carries the same black Roman numeral design, VIII IV XII, set in a clean, serif-style lettering with solid, even linework. The tattoos are shown in greyscale, with the text placed horizontally across the inner wrist and framed by the open palms.

Lettering Forearm Roman numeral Beach

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide clock on the Porthkerris slipway had been painted by Ada Penhallow's father the summer she turned nine, three numerals in black on grey stone: eight for the flood, four for the ebb, twelve for the turn, when the water stood still and nobody could say which way it meant to go. She could read it faster than the almanac, and she liked to tell people so.

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Her brother Tom favoured the twelve. He said it was the only hour that belonged to nobody, so while the boats were out he sat on the wall with his boots dangling and counted gulls lifting off the mud. Ada counted the fishing boats coming in past the breakwater: one, two, a gap, then the Mary Jane, always last, her engine coughing like an old man climbing stairs.

One February the Mary Jane did not round the point at twelve. Ada sat on the wall until her fingers went white and the paint on the numerals blurred in the sleet, and when the lifeboat finally went out she watched it from the slipway without once looking away. Tom came in on the evening tide, soaked and cross at the fuss, and found that his sister had scratched a small tick beside the twelve with a nail, the way their father used to mark a safe return.

Tom never mentioned the tick. Ada never rubbed it out. Every morning after, she checked the water against the numerals, and every morning it turned at twelve exactly as it was meant to, and she found she could forgive the sea for that.