Black fine serif Roman numerals reading IX, XXVII, VIII sit in a horizontal line across the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Roman numerals across a shoulder blade

Lettering · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a black ink tattoo of three Roman numeral groups, separated by small dots, set in a classic serif typeface. The lines are crisp and even, with solid black fill and no visible shading, and the skin around the lettering shows slight redness typical of a fresh tattoo. The tattoo is centred in the frame on the upper back, with the shoulder and a dark top visible at the edge.

Lettering Shoulder Roman numeral Numeral Serif lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brass tag had gone green in the wet, so Ada Penrose rubbed it on her apron before she read the numbers aloud at the pit head. Nine, twenty-seven, eight. Nobody in Tregarth could say what they meant. Old Tobias Rowe had stamped them under the lamp hook the week before he went down to the Level for the last time, and he had never been one to waste a blow on metal without reason.

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The overman said depth. The chapel man said a text. Ada's brother said the price of coal, which was the only answer anyone in the village ever gave. But Ada had worked the screens since she was twelve and knew how Tobias counted, tapping his pick on the rail in threes. So she took a lamp and a coil of cord and walked the ninth gallery, twenty-seven paces, then eight rungs down the old airway, where the wall turned pale with white spar.

There, set into a ledge, sat a tin box no bigger than a Bible. Inside, wrapped in oilcloth, was a heel of bread gone hard as slate and a note in his square hand: the seam holds for those who wait on the surface. Dig where the water runs clear. He had known the seam was failing. He had left a map for the men who would come after, and hidden it where only someone who counted as he did would think to look.

Ada carried the tin up and set it on the trestle beside the cage. The men gathered round without speaking. She hung the brass tag back on its hook, numbers facing out, so the next shift would count them too.