Black lettering tattoo of Roman numerals XX·III on the ankle of a leg resting on a bed, beside a black high-heeled shoe and a silver chain anklet.

Roman numerals tattoo on an ankle

Lettering · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a bold black Roman numeral tattoo, reading XX·III, on the inner side of an ankle. The solid black letterforms are crisp and evenly weighted, with no shading, and the ink is the only colour against pale skin and light bedding. A black high-heeled shoe and a thin silver anklet sit in the frame, with the tattoo placed near the centre of the composition.

Lettering Ankle Roman numeral Numeral

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dad painted the door numbers himself every spring, before the first coaches came down from the Midlands. He used a sable brush and a tin of black enamel, and he never let me touch the Roman ones, because he said a numeral was a promise and I would only smudge it. Twenty-three sat at the top of the back stairs, the room that looked over the harbour wall and rattled whenever the wind swung north.

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The summer I was fifteen, a woman booked it for three weeks and asked for the same room every morning, as if it might be let to someone else while she slept. She tipped in halfpennies, folded the local paper into neat squares and left them on the sill. Mum said she had buried a husband in March. Dad said nothing, but one afternoon he climbed the stairs with a rag and wiped the dust from the door as carefully as if it were a face he was tidying for a visitor.

On her last morning the bed was stripped and the key lay on the washstand with a note tucked beneath it, written in pencil: 'You always get the dot right. Keep it that way.' I didn't understand until I stood in the doorway and looked properly. Dad had put a small black point between the XX and the III, years ago, to make the number read as a sum rather than a shout. Nobody else ever noticed it.

Dad was at the foot of the stairs pretending to fold towels. I showed him the note. He turned the key over in his palm for a long while, then went out to the shed for the enamel. We never repainted that door. Every morning since, when I climb past it with the hot water cans, I count the numerals under my breath, twenty, three, and the little stop between them that holds the two halves together.