Fine black Roman numeral tattoo reading XII XIII XXIV in clean lettering on the side of the ribs.

Roman numerals on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows the Roman numerals XII, XIII and XXIV in a single line of thin black ink. The lettering uses crisp, even linework with solid fill and no shading. It sits on the side of the torso above a dark lace waistband, with a plain skin background and a small mole nearby.

Lettering Fine line Ribs Roman numeral Numeral Text Number

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tom Veale had a brush between his teeth and a tin of white lead balanced on the harbour wall when Ruth Pascoe came down the slipway to tell him the new hull was not to carry a thirteen. He took the brush out to argue. The Gull had been thirteen for thirty years, and she had come home from the Dogger every time she went out, which was more than could be said for the men who had crewed her before the war.

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"Put twelve on her, then," Ruth said, with the ledger under her arm and the tide tables pasted into its back pages. "And the twenty-fourth, for the full day, if you want a second number. Nobody puts thirteen on a boat that's meant to come back." She was not superstitious, she said, only careful, and a careful woman kept a record of which tides had taken what. Tom had seen the page. There was a line for every skipper since 1911, and the thirteenth tide of each month had its own column, mostly empty.

He painted the XII on the bow in a steady hand, letters as tall as his forearm, then sat on an upturned crate with the brush dripping onto his boot. When the paint had set, he took a fine sable from the bottom of the tin and went inside the wheelhouse. On the underside of the shelf above the wheel, where only the man at the helm would ever bend to look, he wrote XIII in small square capitals, the way his father had taught him to letter a headstone, and he did not tell Ruth.

The boat went out on the morning ebb with her name still wet and the sun coming off the water. From the wall Ruth counted the hulls past the breakwater, one, two, and then the third, and her lips moved on a number that was not written in any book she kept.