Black lettering tattoo of the Roman numerals XIII centred on the nape of a person's neck, with dark hair and earrings visible above.

Roman numeral XIII on the nape of the neck

Lettering · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows the back of a person's neck and upper shoulders, with dark hair pulled up and small earrings visible. The tattoo is the Roman numerals XIII in a clean, serif-style black outline, centred below the hairline. The background is dark and the composition is close and straight-on, with the ink as the main point of focus.

Lettering Neck Roman numeral Numeral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ewe had been bad since the turn of the month, and by the time Tomas Keel came up the lane with the lantern, the thirteenth lamb was already lying in the straw with its legs folded wrong. His wife said nothing. She only held the lamp steady while he worked his hands in, slow and patient, the way his father had taught him on this same farm when the snow lay to the sills.

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Thirteen was the number his grandmother never allowed in the byre. Count the lambs twelve, she said, and the thirteenth belongs to the ground, so you give it back before Candlemas. Tomas had laughed at her for it. But when the lamb lived and the ewe lived and the morning came up white over the wall, he found himself at the trough with a chisel, cutting the Roman figures into the lintel above the door, the X and the three I's, as neat as a priest's hand.

Candlemas came and went. The frost stayed. Nobody asked him to give anything back, and the lamb grew into a ewe with a notch in one ear and a temper that kept the others in order. Each winter after, when the snow reached the sills, Tomas touched the carved numerals on his way in, the way you touch a coat hook you have always known is there.

On the last night he was alive, his daughter found him sitting by the door with his hand flat on the stone and the lamp still burning in the yard, and behind the wall thirteen sheep breathing quietly in the dark.