Black ink lettering tattoo on the upper back showing Roman numerals V·XV·XXVII above the script words Love you, in a serif and cursive lettering style.

Roman numerals and script Love you on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows Roman numerals reading V·XV·XXVII in a upright serif typeface, with the words Love you written beneath in a flowing cursive script. Both elements are rendered in black ink with smooth, even linework and no visible shading. The photo is a close, slightly angled view of the skin with the lettering centred in the frame.

Lettering Back Roman numeral Script text Numeral

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Aemilia, forgive the smudges. The dust of this province gets into the bread, the boots and the ink, and the wind has been trying to take my stylus all week. The paymaster has finally stopped counting us as one heap and started counting us properly, so there is a new board in the headquarters tent, and I have spent my evening copying its marks for you.

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The surveyor who made it is a thin Gaul called Brocchus who talks to his instruments as if they might answer. He wanted each figure set apart with a dot on either side, so no clerk could mistake fifteen for fifty when the wine ration came round. Five, then fifteen, then twenty-seven, each group standing on its own little bridge of dots. He says that is why the eye reads them so quickly. I told him my wife reads faster than any clerk in Ostia, and he laughed until he dropped his plumb line in the mud.

Those are the sums of the work, but they are not what I wanted to tell you. Festus has wrapped the board in oiled cloth for the carrier leaving at dawn, and the boy asked what I wanted written at the bottom of your copy. I said nothing fancy. So beneath the numbers I have looped two plain words in the flowing hand you taught me when we were young, and I pressed the stylus so hard the wax nearly split.

Love you, Aemilia. If you doubt the arithmetic, count the dots. There is always one more between us than there is between the soldiers and the sky, and I am keeping every one of them for the day I walk back through our gate.