Close-up of a black lettering tattoo reading LXXVI in Roman numerals, placed on the back of a person's neck below a hair bun.

Roman numerals LXXVI on the back of the neck

Lettering · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows the back of a person's neck with a small tattoo of the Roman numerals LXXVI set horizontally across the centre. The characters are rendered in solid black ink with a serif letterform and clean, even edges. The background is pale and softly lit, with hair pinned up and a hoop earring visible at the edge of the frame.

Lettering Neck Roman numeral Number

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

No, sit down, you'll not hear it on your feet. Mile seventy-six, that's where the post stands, the one with the numerals cut in its face because the county man said plain figures rot in the sun. LXXVI. Every lorry driver on the Tallow Road knows it, and not one of them can read it without his lips moving.

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Pilar Mott cut those letters in the spring of the drought, with a borrowed chisel and a bucket of her husband's kitchen water to keep the dust off. Her man drove the tanker between the wells and came home every night with his boots white to the ankle. She'd sit on the step counting the wagons that passed, and when the numbers got too big for her she started carving them into the post instead, one stroke per truck, so that the thing was half writing and half tally.

The county never came to check. What they found, a decade on, was a post so thick with notches that a man could hardly tell the old marks from the new, and the Roman figures sat on top like a lid. A boy asked his father what LXXVI meant, and his father shrugged, so the boy asked Pilar, who was by then too stiff to stand and too proud to say so. She told him it meant seventy-six, and that seventy-six was the number of times her husband had come home safe. He never asked her if that was true, and she never told him it wasn't.