Fine line black Roman numerals tattooed on the inner wrist and forearm of a hand with a ring on one finger.

Roman numerals on an inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a small tattoo of Roman numerals in thin black linework running diagonally across the inner wrist. The lines are crisp and even, with no visible shading, and the skin shows a healed, settled appearance. The soft, neutral background and light tone keep the focus on the tattoo and the hand, which is turned palm up with a ring on one finger.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Roman numeral Number Wrist Ring

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Win,

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The Hallam clock came down off the Corn Exchange on Tuesday, and I have been trying since to work out what to do with the dial. Mr Pratt wants it binned. Old Ada Hallam, who paid for it in 1911, wants it back on the wall before the Whitsun fair, and she is eighty-four and will not be argued with. So I have it on my bench under the good lamp, twelve numerals in cast iron, each one a little crooked where some apprentice filed the hands too deep.

Here is the odd part. Behind the XII someone has scratched XXIV in pencil, very small, the way a foreman marks a crate. It is not a time, because the hands still say ten past four. It is not a date either, unless it is the twenty-fourth of something. I have looked at it through the glass for an hour and a half, and under it there is a faint word the paint has half eaten. I thought you might know whether your father ever mentioned a Hallam boy who went off to the mills that year.

Don't come up on the Thursday train, the line is shut for the bridge. Write back instead and tell me whether the minute hand was ever bent on purpose, because I am beginning to think it was.

Yours, Len