Black ink tattoo of Roman numerals XXVI XI XC with a looping script line above it, on the inner wrist beside a gold watch.

Roman numerals and script on a wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a black ink tattoo on the inner wrist. Two lines sit across the skin: a row of Roman numerals, XXVI, XI and XC, separated by small dots, and a thin, looping handwritten script above it. The ink is solid black with no grey shading, and the lettering is crisp against a light skin tone. A gold metal watch strap and a cream knit sleeve frame the lower and upper edges of the shot.

Lettering Forearm Roman numeral Script Handwriting Number Wrist

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are fourteen the winter the Mint at Serrow orders its keys re-cut, and you are the only one in the workshop who can read your father's hand. His script loops above the numerals in the ledger like a river that cannot decide its course. Beneath it, in the same ink, sit XXVI, XI and XC, each pair divided by a small dot, as if he meant them to be spoken aloud.

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The clerks laugh and call them a grocer's tally. You do not laugh. You carry the ledger to the scullery window where the light is good and you count the way he taught you, the twenty-sixth day of the eleventh month and ninety strokes. The great clock in the Mint tower strikes ninety times each year on the feast of Saint Aldric, and every year a boy is sent up the ladder to oil its gears and tell no one what he sees behind the face.

On the feast you climb it yourself, a lantern knocking against your hip and the ledger buttoned inside your coat. At the ninetieth stroke the bronze swallows every other sound, and a panel you had never noticed swings open on your father's hinge. Inside lie unsigned deeds for the valley farms, each one sealed in wax the colour of dried blood. You take only the one with your mother's name on it, and leave the rest for the frost to find. Below you, the clock keeps its count, and from that night you do too.