Close-up of a small black fine line Roman numeral tattoo on the upper chest, partly visible above a white collar and black leather jacket.

Roman numerals on the upper chest

Lettering · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up of a woman's upper chest, cropped below the chin, showing a small black tattoo of Roman numerals placed just below the collarbone. The numerals are set in a fine, clean serif style and the end of the design is cut off by the edge of the shot. A thin necklace chain sits above the tattoo, and the pale skin contrasts with a white collared shirt and black leather jacket.

Lettering Fine line Chest Roman numeral Numeral Lettering Collarbone

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mason Brannoc cut the numerals into the Sealing Hall lintel himself, and he swore to me that his eighth chisel split on the final stroke, which is why the last figure of the twenty-fifth year runs off the edge of the stone. The king wanted the lintel finished before the frost came down from the Greymarch. The queen wanted it finished without a crack. I was the only one in Ossery who kept the tally, so each morning I climbed the scaffold with my ledger and copied what the stone said back into ink.

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The chamberlain came up the ladder on the third day, puffing like a bellows, and asked me to make the count read twenty-four. The old reign had ended in the winter of the twenty-fourth year, he said, and nobody wanted a new king to inherit a fat tally of years he had not earned. I told him the stone did not care who was crowned. He told me the stone was not the Crown's ledger, and that I was. We argued until the bells of the lower town rang the hour, and neither of us conceded.

That night I went back up alone with a lantern. Rain had pooled in the cut grooves, and in the light the numerals looked less like a count of years than a row of small, stubborn gates. I traced the open edge of the last figure with my thumb. Brannoc's split had left it unfinished, and the gap felt less like a fault than an honest admission that no reign is ever closed off neatly.

In the morning I wrote the twenty-fifth year in my ledger exactly as the stone showed it, letting the last stroke trail off the page. The chamberlain read it over my shoulder and said nothing. Below us the masons were already hauling the next block up the Greymarch road.