Fine black Roman numerals arranged in a circle with small dots between them, tattooed on the inside of a forearm in a lettering style.

Roman numerals in a circle on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black tattoo of Roman numerals arranged in a ring, with small dots between the characters, sits on the inner forearm. The serif lettering has clean, even linework and solid black ink with no shading. The circle is centred on the forearm against a white paper surface, and the skin is the only visible body part.

Lettering Forearm Roman numeral Circle Numeral Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Carrow Dale would tell the young engineer why the chapel clock had no hands, only that the numerals had been cut into the stone the year the seam flooded. Dim Wardle, the lamp man, said it plainly enough over his pint: the hands went down the shaft with the last shift before the water came, and they were never brought back up.

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The numbers ran round the face in a ring, each one with a dot between it and the next, as if the mason had meant to keep count of something other than hours. Children counted them on the way to school. Six, then the dot, then one. Mothers counted them when a husband was late off the cage. Nobody counted them aloud after the year the pit closed.

The engineer, Tomas Hale, had a theory about a brass pointer on a rope and a weight, something that could tell the time from below ground. He went down in March with a torch and a tin of bread. He came up on the third morning with a pointer in one hand and no memory of where he had been, only that the hour was twelve and the pit was quiet.

He hung the pointer on the chapel wall himself. It moved, and the village set its watches by it again, and nobody asked him what he had seen down there. Some things a dale keeps for itself.