Close photograph of a fine black Roman numeral tattoo reading II II LXXXII on the side of a foot, with a small outline heart above it near the ankle.

Roman numerals and small heart on an ankle

Lettering · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

The image shows the side of a foot and ankle with two black tattoos: a small outline heart near the ankle bone and a line of Roman numerals, II II LXXXII, across the lower foot. The linework is thin and even, with the numerals set in a classic serif-style font. The tattoo is in black ink only, shown against soft, neutral skin tones with a blurred grey background.

Lettering Fine line Ankle Roman numeral Heart Numeral Foot

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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

Your grandmother never wrote anything down that she could stamp into lead, so the beds in the walled garden at Wrenfield carry their numbers on tags, not in any proper plan. By the time you inherit the key, half the tags have bent in the frost and the ledger in the potting shed has gone soft at the corners. You spend the first March sorting them by feel, kneeling on sacking, trying to match the numerals to the rows they came from.

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Bed II II LXXXII is the one that troubles you. Two, two, and eighty-two, the tag says, and nothing in the ledger answers to it. You dig the bed over anyway, and under the clay you find a cracked heart of slate, no bigger than a thumbnail, with a hole bored through one lobe for wire.

Mr Pell from the village, who has been pruning the same pear tree since before you were born, watches you hold it up to the light. "She planted that bed the spring your mother was born," he says. "Said the numbers were a day she'd promised to come back for. She never did." He turns the slate over in his cracked fingers and gives it back. "Lilies, most years. Nothing else would take there."

You plant lilies. In July the bed opens white and loud, and you stand among them with the slate in your pocket, counting open blooms the way she must have counted days, until the numbers mean less than the patience it took to keep a promise in soil for forty years.