Small black Roman numerals tattooed on an ankle, with beige stiletto court shoes in the background.

Roman numerals on an ankle beside beige heels

Lettering · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a bare ankle and foot with a small line of Roman numerals tattooed on the skin near the heel. The lettering is fine and solid in dark grey-black ink, and the numerals are set in a plain serif style. Two beige stiletto court shoes are angled across the frame against a blurred purple and dark background.

Lettering Ankle Roman numeral Numeral Ankle Heel

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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

Dennis Pask had cut numerals into brass for thirty-one years, and he did not care for the girl from the office standing over his bench with a clipboard. "The client wants them finer," she said. "Finer than what?" he asked, though he knew. The stiletto lasts were already stacked by the door, pale and waiting, and the design had come down from London with a note saying the serif should look as if it had always been there.

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He took the old punch from its drawer, the one stamped with the year the factory first sent its shoes south, and held it up to the window. The face had worn soft at the feet of the M's. Nobody had asked for that softness, but it was what made the stamp look like the work of hands rather than a machine. He told her this. She wrote something down, and he suspected it would be ignored.

He spent the afternoon with a loupe and a scrap of offcut leather, cutting a fresh set of numerals no taller than a barley grain. Each one needed a small hesitation at the top of the stroke, a breath held, which no machine could copy. By five his fingers ached and the sample was done. He pressed it into the leather and it came up clean and grey as slate.

Before the van came, he took one last pair from the stack, turned it over, and pressed his own tiny mark inside the heel where no one would look: a crooked I set beside the proper numerals. It was a foolish habit, and he had done it for every run since the first. The shoes would walk a long way before anyone found it.