Black Roman numerals I, VIII and II in a serif lettering style across the inner wrist, with a red trainer visible in the background.

Roman numerals on a wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a black tattoo reading I VIII II in Roman numerals, set in a classic serif lettering style across the inner wrist. The lines are solid and even, with the strokes of the V and the stacked I characters showing clean edges. The skin tone is light and the background is a grey pavement with a dark trouser leg and a red and white trainer, all softly out of focus.

Lettering Forearm Roman numeral Numeral Number

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The painted numbers on the wagons were older than anyone still travelling with the Vanterpool Marvel, and Mrs Oldroyd, who kept the ledger, would not let a single one be scraped off. First came the ringmaster's caravan, marked I. Then the cage wagon, marked VIII, for the eight animals the grandfather had bought in Hull. The third was II, the cookhouse, where the bread was baked each morning before the light came up over the common.

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The trouble started when the first wagon was sold to a man in Carlisle who wanted the brass lamps. After that the eight animals went down to six, then to five, and the old lion Samson was buried under the hawthorn at the edge of the field in March. Mrs Oldroyd sat with the ledger open for three nights and then took out a pot of black paint. She said the count was a promise and not a list, and a promise did not care how many were left to keep it.

Tobias, the boy who did the painting, asked her what the numbers meant if the wagons were gone. She told him that a count only needs one person standing at the end of it, and that the fox which had followed the Marvel out of Lancashire would never come back to a field where somebody still knew the order. So on the last night of the season he climbed onto the cookhouse roof with a brush and repainted the II that had flaked to nothing.

When he came down, Mrs Oldroyd had lit the lamps on the bare bed where the first wagon had stood. Below him the cart horses shifted in the dark. He stood beside her until the lamps guttered, and then he went to bed counting.