Close-up of a small black Roman numeral tattoo reading VIII, XXV, LIV in a serif lettering style on the inner upper arm of a woman in a dark knitted jumper.

Roman numerals on an upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman's upper arm, partly covered by a dark knitted jumper sleeve, shows three groups of Roman numerals in black ink. The serif lettering is crisp and evenly spaced, with small dots separating each group. The background is a tiled bathroom with a lace curtain, and the photo is softly lit with the tattoo kept in sharp focus.

Lettering Upper arm Roman numeral Numeral Lettering Arm

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain has been coming sideways across the Saturday market since seven, and you are still wrestling the awning pegs into the cobbles when the old man lays a pocket watch on your trestle table. The brass case is dull and the glass is clouded, and across the back someone has cut three groups of Roman numerals, each set apart by a small dot: eight, twenty-five, fifty-four. He doesn't speak. He only taps the lid twice and waits, rain dripping from the peak of his cap onto the marmalade jars.

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You know movements, not riddles. You tell him the mainspring is probably gone and the balance staff has rusted into its jewel, and that you'd give him twelve pounds and call it generous. He shakes his head. Thirty, he says, and it has to be you who takes it, because the last three people who bought it brought it back within the week. You ask why. He looks at the numerals for a long moment and says the watch is not broken, only unfinished, then walks off between the fish stalls with his collar up before you can ask what that means.

That evening you open it at the bench with the lamp pulled close and the skylight ticking under the rain. The movement is seized, as you said, but folded behind the dial is a slip of paper no bigger than a stamp, pencilled in a careful hand. Eight is the hour the kettle goes on. Twenty-five is the step by the back door, the one that creaks. Fifty-four is the year the two of them stopped speaking, and the year they started again. You read it twice and set it down.

You clean the pivots with a brush and a drop of oil, and somewhere past midnight the balance gives a small, reluctant tick. You don't wind it. You hold it to your ear and wait, and it keeps going, and for the first time in your working life you have no idea what time it is.