Black Roman numeral lettering tattoo on a forearm, beside a thin gold bracelet and a white supplement tub.

Roman numerals on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close side view of a forearm and hand resting on a white supplement tub, with a row of black Roman numerals tattooed along the forearm beside a thin gold bracelet. The numerals are set in a plain, upright lettering style in black ink, with soft even light against a pale wall. The frame is cropped above the shoulder and below the hip, with fitted grey clothing filling the right side of the image.

Lettering Forearm Roman numeral Bracelet Hand

Find an artist for this

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

Mistress Hallam never let anyone cut a numeral with a modern punch. "The tongue of a bell reads the way the founder spoke," she said, and set the boy at the wax with a bone stylus and a sheet of the old reference, the one with the cracked corner. He was to cut the date round the lip of the mould, MDCCXLI, then the name of the parish, then the long row of tallies the vestry had insisted on, one for every christening that had rung that year.

Keep reading

The tallies were the trouble. Tom counted them three times and got three different sums, and each time he had to scrape the wax smooth and begin the row again, the letters going crooked under his thumb. Hallam did not shout. She poured a cup of tea gone cold, sat on the bench, and watched him until the tenth row came out even, the III leaning against the XX like two old men at a gate.

When the metal went in, the foundry smelled of scorched sugar and wet clay. Tom stood at the pit with his hands in his apron and waited for the bell to cool, because Hallam said you did not look at a casting until it had decided what it was. In the morning they broke the mould away, and there the year stood in raised bronze, every stroke as sharp as a fresh cut.

The bell was hung in the tower that summer and rung for weddings and funerals alike. Nobody counted the tallies after that. They were simply there, the way the parish was there, and Tom came to think that was the whole point of writing a thing in a form nobody had to read to know it.