Small black Roman numerals tattooed on the inner forearm near the wrist, with a knitted grey sleeve pushed up above it.

Roman numerals on an inner forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small black tattoo of stylised Roman numerals sits on the inner forearm, with letterforms that overlap and interlock. The lines are solid black with some variation in weight, and the design is shown in plain black ink against pale skin. The photo is taken at an angle, with the tattoo near the centre and a grey knitted sleeve at the top right.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sea took the boat on the fourteenth of March, and nobody in Skerrow thought it strange that the tide had come up the slip with a man's cap on its back. Mags Tully kept the tally anyway. She cut each day into the lintel of the net shed with her gutting knife, one stroke for every day, and when a week was done she cut the mark the old women had taught her, a gate with a bar laid across it.

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Her boy Davy had gone out with the Ada Rose in the autumn. Nobody counted him missing at first, because boats came in late when the herring ran. But the Ada Rose came back alone, and after that Mags stopped going down to the quay and went to the shed instead.

In the fourteenth year of cutting, a stranger came up the harbour steps with a coil of rope over his shoulder and stopped to look at the lintel. He said a count needs only one line, not a crossing of strokes, and asked why she bothered. Mags told him the marks crossed where the days overlapped, because she had never once stopped expecting the sea to give something back, and a tally made of hope is never quite straight.

The shed fell in the winter of the big gale. The lintel lay on the shingle until spring, when the children of Skerrow found it and traced the crossed strokes with their fingers, saying the number aloud until it stopped being a number and became the name of the place where they played.

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