Black and grey photo of two forearms with a Roman numeral lettering tattoo on the right forearm and a thin vertical line of script on the left.

Roman numerals and script on two forearms

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows two forearms held out towards the camera, with the wearer's graphic T-shirt in the background. The right forearm carries a row of Roman numerals in a serif typeface, with a small outlined triangle near the wrist. The left forearm has a vertical line of very fine script that is too small to read, and the image is entirely black and grey.

Lettering Forearm Roman numeral Script Triangle Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tally was my grandfather's idea, and he kept it in chalk on the inside of the cider barn door, where the wet never reached. Every bin that went up the lane to the press got a stroke, and every fifth stroke got crossed through, the way he'd been taught by a man who ran the orchard before the war. By the last week of August the door was so crowded with marks that Nan said it looked like a clock someone had lost the hands from.

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I was sixteen that summer and had been given the job of counting the Discovery apples off the ground, which meant walking the rows at six with a wicker basket and a torch I didn't need once the sun came up. The trees were heavy and grumbling. Wasps drank the windfalls by the gate. Halfway down the third row I found a bramley split open with a hollow in its heart, and in the hollow a tiny triangle of wood, sharp-edged, like something a carpenter had dropped and no one had come back for.

I brought it home and put it on the sill beside the chalk. Grandad looked at it for a long time, then took a pencil from behind his ear and wrote the numbers out again underneath the old ones, all the way up to the year they had sold the top field. 'That's the count,' he said. 'Anything else is just the apples telling you where they've been.' The triangle stayed on the sill until the frost, and the door kept filling.