Woman seen from behind with a vertical black Roman numeral tattoo running down her spine and a partial tattoo on her upper arm.

Roman numerals down the spine

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph taken from behind shows a vertical line of black Roman numerals with dot separators running down the centre of the spine. A second tattoo, partly visible on the upper arm, is also in black ink. The subject wears a backless burgundy sequin dress and sits on a patterned bedspread, with a teddy bear and clothes hangers in the background.

Lettering Back Upper arm Roman numeral Numeral Spine Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tobias had been told the numerals would be the easy part. Twelve of them, Roman, to be repainted on the enamel face of the Harrowgate station clock, and then the long hand would do the rest. He climbed the iron ladder on the Tuesday with a tin of black paint, a fine sable brush and a flask of cold tea, and found the old lettering had flaked away in a line down the middle of the dial, leaving only a ghost of the sequence.

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The clock had been stopped since the winter the coal wagons stopped running. Nobody in the ticket office could say why. Mrs Oddie, who sold pies on the platform, swore her husband had seen the hands move once, at midnight, going backwards. Tobias thought that was the sort of thing people said about any clock that refused to be fixed.

He worked through the afternoon. The numbers came back one stroke at a time: X, then a dot, then the next numeral, each dot placed exactly where the old spacing had been, so the sequence ran down the face like a line of stitches. When he reached the last mark he stepped back onto the gantry, and a wind came off the moor and set the hour hand ticking forward, one notch, then another, as though it had been waiting for a reason.

Down on the platform, Mrs Oddie raised her pie tin in salute. Tobias packed his brushes and did not mention that the minute hand had only moved because he had leaned against the frame. He had given the clock the hour he finished, and the clock, being honest, had kept it.