Black and grey Roman numerals XXIV.X.VIII tattooed in a lettering style across a forearm.

Roman numerals on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows the Roman numerals XXIV, X and VIII, separated by small dots, set in a serif lettering style across the inner forearm. The characters have bold outlines with grey shading that gives them a slightly raised, three-dimensional look. The skin is pale against a dark background, and the lettering runs horizontally across most of the width of the frame.

Lettering Forearm Roman numeral Numeral Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ledger at Seaholme Lodge lives on the hall table under a tin of barley sugars, and Mrs Pardoe will not let anyone carry it upstairs. You learn to read it the way you read tide tables, in columns, with her pencil ticks marking who paid and who didn't. On the last page of the winter season, in her cramped hand, is a line that makes you stop: the twenty-fourth, the tenth, the eighth. Nobody in Brindle Bay writes a date like that.

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"It's the day the Mary Ellen went down off the breakwater," she says, not looking up from the kettle. "Put the number on the board and nobody asks questions." You ask who was aboard. She says a lad called Tom Venn, who sold shrimp from a barrow and owed her a fortnight's rent. The wind rattles the sash in room six, the one with the cracked washbasin, and you realise that room has been empty since October.

You take the key down anyway. Upstairs, the floorboards hold the cold the way a rock pool holds sun. You open the window and the sea comes in with its smell of salt and diesel. Tucked inside the wardrobe door is a shipping slip, and on the back someone has drawn a clock face with no hands and written the same three figures around its rim, careful and square, the way a stonemason would cut them.

Back downstairs, you open the ledger to the page, find Tom's name, and write the date beside the debt. Then you cross the debt out and write paid in full. The kettle clicks off. Mrs Pardoe says nothing, only slides a mug across the counter, and the numerals sit between you on the page like a fence post nobody has the heart to pull up.