Black serif Roman numerals reading P. IV. XIII run vertically across the side of a torso, with a black garment at the edge of the frame.

Roman numerals P. IV. XIII on the side

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of a vertical line of black serif lettering reading P. IV. XIII, with full stops between the groups, tattooed on the side of a person's torso. The letters are solid black with clean edges and no shading, and the skin around them is slightly reddened. The composition is a close crop with the text running down the centre, and a dark garment and a hand appear at the edges of the frame.

Lettering Ribs Roman numeral Text Letter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down on that crate, love, the wasps have gone off for their dinner. You want to know what the letters mean. Everyone asks. My father's father cut them into the bark of the old Bramley in Hollin's Piece, and the men who came after him kept painting them back on with lime wash when the rain took them off. P for Pell, that was the plot. IV for the fourth row from the lane. XIII for the thirteenth tree, counting from the gate, though the lad from the council swore we'd miscounted for thirty years.

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Late August was the time for it. You'd walk the rows at first light with a basket on your arm and a knife in your belt, checking which windfalls had split and which had gone to wasp-soft mush. Thirteen was always the stingy one. It flowered late and gave you more leaves than apples, and every harvest my father said he'd have it up for firewood, and every harvest he came back at dusk and stood with his hand flat on that trunk like he was feeling a horse for fever.

The year the lane was tarmacked and the lorries couldn't turn, nobody came to pick the fourth row at all. I went out on my own in September, expecting nothing but brown fruit in the long grass. Instead the thirteenth tree was heavy, its branches propped on forked sticks, every apple the colour of a fox. I stood there with my basket empty and understood that the numbers had never been an address. They were a promise he'd made to a tree that gave nothing back for years, and the tree had been keeping it all along.